Project Summary
Design and development teams at Qlink had been encountering difficulties with maintaining a consistent user experience. There was an ever-increasing demand for new features and improvement to old ones but teams had found themselves facing challenges to maintain consistency across different platforms and devices and ensuring that each new addition aligned correctly with the existing design language and functionality.
The number of designers and developers at the company was also growing and it becoming increasingly more difficult to ensure that everyone was on the same page in terms of the design language and development practices.
The company simply didn't have a single source of truth for designing digital experiences.
I was responsible for pitching the need for this to shareholders and then leading the creation of a design system that hosted and documented design with the aim of allowing the internal teams to create consistent experiences more effectively.
Audit and Presentation
In order to better understand the scope of work required to create a cohesive design system I started with putting together an audit of currently used process, features and UI components across the entire platform to showcase where we having these inconsistencies and what was at the root of them.
The audit revealed a number of inconsistencies in how the work was either being designed or developed. Design and development teams were working off their own versions of style guides or component libraries, constantly rebuilding components which was leading to a number of inefficiencies and discrepancies between teams.
Collaborative Buy-In
After completing the audit, the results were presented to stakeholders to demonstrate the value of adding a design system to the organization.
At first, it wasn't immediately apparent how investing in a design system would provide a good return on investment of developer allocation. However, we were able to address this concern by demonstrating how the time saved for both designers and developers through the use of prototypes would generate its own ROI.
After further discussion and gaining buy in from all parties I connected with the design and development teams to further discuss what would be needed in the system from a functional and visual standpoint. Getting collaborative buy in from both departments from this was necessary as the design system essentially creates a centralized place for designers and developers to interact with each others work.
I also began researching what other companies were creating for their design systems within the broader industry and started familiarizing myself with design system best practices. Looking into how they were created, documented and maintained at a number of companies like IBM, Salesforce and Adobe.
Consolidated Components
Once we had established what the system would need to contain to exist as a single source of truth for both teams I started exploring and establishing new consolidated components and patterns. I started with existing design patterns and either evolved or refined them through multiple iterations until we arrived at a few solutions which we would test with the larger team.I created a number of prototypes and mockups to help the teams visualize and validate the foundation we were using to create the system.
Working with a lead developer we careful planned and wrote out the initial documentation and guidelines for the system and it's usage as we continued to build out the templates for it's UI components.
Results and Ongoing Work
After the initial deployment of the system and teaching members of the team how to use it we saw many improvements in consistency, process, and quality across both design and development teams. These results have continued to inspire the ongoing work on the system, which has since evolved to become an integral part of a larger redesign of the existing Qlink platform.
