Design System Work

Design systems are some of my favorite projects to work on. They facilitate consistency, efficiency, and accessibility at scale.

I’ve been able to participate in various design system initiatives over the past few years. Some highlights of these projects include the following:

• I collaborated with developers to create a Storybook component library and incorporate into a product

• I revamped color and typography for a web app to align with brand, improve accessibility, create effective visual hierarchy and eliminate redundancy. These changes were incorporated into multiple new features.

• I cleaned up an icon library and designed new icons to replace ambiguous ones

• I set up a feedback system for bugs, feedback, and component requests for a design system

• I created and managed several Figma libraries to promote consistency across the design team

Key lessons I’ve learned:

1. Adoption is hard! Incorporating a design system into an existing app can require significant up-front work. Therefore…

2. …Documenting rationale is essential. I created detailed design rationale to show to the business that adopting the changes was worth their investment.

3. Addressing feedback takes time. Some feedback requires further investigation, and that’s fine. I created a place to track feedback where I could tag the relevant people and update them as we investigated the issue further.

Note: Information in this case study is used with permission from the company.