CRAFTING A COHESIVE DESIGN SYSTEM
WOVN Technologies was expanding quickly, and our UI/UX design needed to keep up. We faced a mix of design challenges, uneven user experiences, and accessibility concerns. Over three months, our mission was to unify our design approach, making it more user-friendly and scalable. This effort wasn't just about looking good; it was crucial for boosting our team's efficiency and ensuring we could grow seamlessly in the future.
Role
As a UI/UX designer, I played a pivotal role in refining our design system, with a particular emphasis on enhancing elements such as navigation, color schemes, and various interface components. While my efforts drove significant portions of the system's overall improvement, it was truly a collaborative endeavor.
Responsibilities
My responsibilities were multi-faceted and deeply rooted in research and prototyping. I worked on refining the components of our design system, establishing guidelines, and optimizing interactions. This was to ensure consistency, usability, and accessibility across all our products. I also focused on aligning the system with our brand identity and user needs, enhancing overall user experience.
Team Credits
While my role was specific to certain elements of the design system, I was part of a collaborative design team. Together, we worked towards providing a user-centered framework for creating engaging experiences.
Valentine T. (Senior UI/UX Designer)
Kendrick P. (Senior Product Designer)
Duration
3 months
The challenge
WOVN Technologies was growing fast, but without a unified design system, our site became inconsistent and possibly hard for some users to access. These issues could confuse our users, delay our design team, and limit how quickly we could grow. Our aim was to fix this by creating a clear and user-friendly design system, making our work more efficient and supporting our company's expansion
Navigation
I recognized the profound impact navigation has on user experience and undertook a comprehensive analysis to enhance this crucial component. By integrating insights from both user behavior analytics and direct feedback, I refined our platform's navigation, emphasizing clarity, organization, and user expectations. This comprehensive redesign led to an intuitive system, directly increasing user engagement and dramatically reducing navigation-related frustrations, ensuring a seamless experience for our users on the platform.
IMPLEMENTATION & CHALLENGES
In our journey to implement our design system, several challenges emerged:
Adoption Across Teams: Ensuring adoption required extensive training and team alignment. It wasn't just about introducing a new system; it was about reshaping our collective approach to design.
Legacy Designs: Integrating the new system with our existing products was complex. Our goal was to revamp without disrupting current workflows or the user experience.
Consistency & Maintenance: Keeping our design system updated and consistent was a continuous endeavor. We tackled this by setting up a dedicated maintenance team and crafting clear documentation.
Balancing Customization & Consistency: Finding the sweet spot between unique customizations and maintaining a consistent look and feel was a nuanced challenge. Flexible guidelines and open team discussions became essential.
Through these challenges, we learned invaluable lessons that refined both our design system and our collaborative approach.
The implementation of our design system marked a significant shift in our design and development process. It not only improved the overall aesthetic, functionality, and user-friendliness of our products, but also had profound impacts on our operational efficiency.
Tangible benefits manifested in the form of time savings. Each designer and developer saved numerous hours each week, which led to streamlined workflows and faster project completions. The system also brought a high level of consistency to our products, significantly reducing post-development fixes and reworks. This improved the quality of our end products and provided a unified user experience across the board.
The design system also eliminated redundant tasks, further optimizing team resources and time. Beyond these operational gains, the cost savings that arose from these efficiencies underscored the direct business value of our work.
Our design system didn't just result in visually pleasing designs; it was a significant contributor to our company's bottom line. In essence, the design system served as a strong foundation for our product development, removing ambiguity, enhancing efficiency, and shaping a transformative impact on our workflow and results.
RESULTS
Efficiency boost
10
The strategic improvements we made to our design system significantly optimized our workflows. It led to a substantial reduction in time required for both design and development tasks, saving each designer and engineer an average of 10 hours per week.
Inconsistency reduction
25%
By standardizing our design components and establishing clear guidelines, we managed to reduce inconsistencies that needed to be fixed post-development by 25%. This saved us significant rework time and accelerated our product launch timelines.
Workflow streamlining
20%
The design system served as a guiding light, providing clear direction and eliminating ambiguity. This streamlined our design and development workflows, resulting in an increase in project completion speed by 20%.
Resource optimization
40%
With the new design system in place, we also saw a 40% reduction in redundant efforts, freeing up valuable resources and time. This meant more capacity for our team to focus on innovation and creating user-centric solutions.
IMPACT BY
DESIGN
Creating and using Wovn's design system was a big step for us. It made our products better and helped our team work more efficiently. This whole process showed us how important a good design system can be.
Teamwork was the key to our success. Everyone, from designers to developers and other team members, worked together. We all talked openly and made sure our new system helped everyone.
We also learned that making our products easy for everyone to use is vital. Our main goal was to make sure our designs were helpful for all our users.
A big lesson was that a design system keeps changing. As our company and our users change, we need to keep updating our designs.
This project also showed that good design is good for business. We saved time, worked better, and even saved money. This showed us how important design can be for a company.
For me, this was a great learning experience. It helped me grow as a designer and understand how design can help a company succeed. I'll use these lessons in all my future work.
Final thoughts & key takeaways
As we strive to continuously evolve our design system, we foresee opportunities for further growth and enhancement. Future endeavors include an expansion of our component library as we introduce more products and features. It is crucial that new components align seamlessly with the existing system and improve overall user experience.
We also acknowledge the importance of thorough documentation for the design system and aim to bolster this aspect, making it comprehensive and user-friendly. A commitment to accessibility is at the heart of our mission, hence we will implement regular audits to ensure compliance with standards and to identify any areas in need of enhancement.
Conducting ongoing usability testing is a key aspect of our future plans. We aim to gain valuable insights into user interactions with our products, using this feedback to fine-tune the design system. Lastly, as our product line potentially expands across multiple platforms, maintaining consistency in the user experience will be a paramount focus.
We believe that a design system is a living entity, constantly evolving and improving, and we are devoted to this process of iterative refinement as our company continues to grow and adapt to our users' needs.
Potential future improvements
Color
Recognizing color as a potent tool for aesthetics, usability, and branding, I harmonized our brand identity with an accessible and systematic color palette. This process involved closely aligning with brand values, adhering to accessibility standards, and establishing a strategic color framework, ensuring a consistent user interface across our products. Through meticulous selection, testing, and refinement, the end result was an enhanced user experience, bolstered by a cohesive and intuitive color system that resonated with our brand's essence.
Input
In our pursuit to elevate user experience, we revamped the design and functionality of input elements within our platform. By enhancing the organization of input fields, clarifying labels, adhering to accessibility standards, and refining validation feedback, we achieved a more intuitive, inclusive, and streamlined input experience for users across our products.
Buttons
In my role within the design system team, I placed special emphasis on button optimization. Recognizing their importance in guiding user interactions, I streamlined their design, behavior, and states to ensure both consistency and intuitive feedback across all our products. My efforts in refining buttons—covering aspects like style, state, and interactions—were central in creating a more unified and user-friendly interface, guiding users seamlessly through their digital journey with us.
Iconography
I designed our iconography to align with our brand, emphasizing simplicity, clarity, and consistency. By focusing on scalability and versatility, I ensured our icons were both aesthetically pleasing and functional across various contexts, enhancing user comprehension and navigation throughout our products.