Challenge of growth

Executive leadership was uncertain about which brand would ultimately represent our products, leading to a lack of clarity in our direction. The diverse tech stacks used across different products were causing operational headaches. Churn reports revealed a consistent issue: our products lacked accessibility, impacting user satisfaction across the board.

Our goal was to

• Deliver a Unified Experience: Create a coherent and connected user experience across all products.

• Improve Navigation: Design an information architecture that supports easy navigation across our product suite.

• Provide Brand Flexibility: Develop a system adaptable to any brand, accommodating future decisions without limiting product.

• Prioritise Accessibility: Align with the company's focus on meeting the needs of enterprise customers by prioritising accessibility.

  
  

Create cohesive, accessible, and flexible experiences that adapt seamlessly across products and brands.

Discovery

To address these challenges, we began by exploring existing systems solving similar problems and identifying industry best practices. We examined systems like Adobe Spectrum, IBM Carbon, Atlassian Design System, Salesforce’s Lightning and many others. We also partnered with user researchers to gather insights, validate assumptions, and collaborated closely with our in-house accessibility expert to determine the standards we needed to meet.

Findings

Our solutions needed to:

• Meet level AA WCAG 2.0 standards.

• Utilise design tokens to enable scalability and flexible theming.

• Incorporate web components to bridge technical limitations across existing products.

• Deliver custom components and patterns tailored to specific use cases.

• Support marketing and branding needs without being bound to a single brand identity.

Building a foundation

Based on our findings, we started building the foundation of our new design system, focusing on core elements such as colors, typography, spacing, grids, and motion. A significant effort went into creating and documenting design tokens in close collaboration with engineering. At the time there were limited resources on creating an accessible yet dynamic color library that supports theming, therefore the majority of our time went into finding the right solution for this.

Getting buy-in

Up until this point the initiative was driven by product design leadership, and we knew the time has come to show product leadership on how we plan to contribute to delivering on our business goals.
We presented a strong vision showing how a design system can solve our problems, which sparked interest among C-level leadership. After countless rounds of alignment and presentation to executive leadership we got the buy-in to establish a new team – the Design System Team.

This was only the beginning of a ling journey to build this new design system. After years of work the Design Systems Team has taken this effort to new heights and I'm really happy I had a significant contribution to kickstarting and elevating this effort to what it is today – Prisma, a desgin system that scales and changed how we develop products.

Outcomes

• Formation of a Design Systems Team: We successfully advocated for a dedicated team to develop and maintain our new design system.

• New System Development: Secured leadership buy-in to develop a new token- and web component-based system while transitioning existing systems into maintenance mode.

• Product Vision Alignment: Our design system vision became the guiding star for product development, gaining traction and advocacy within and beyond R&D.

• Launch of Prisma: In July 2024, we launched Prisma, our new design system, which has since seen widespread adoption.

  
  

My role has shifted to a supportive capacity—guiding the team towards our product vision, advocating for design systems, and ensuring user and product team needs are met.