Project Background
At PlayVS, we're committed to creating exceptional user experiences. To achieve this, we embarked on a comprehensive revamp of our design system. This initiative aimed to streamline our design process, enhance consistency, and elevate the overall user experience. Our initial design system, while functional, lacked consistency in UX patterns, color usage, and accessibility considerations. Additionally, redundant components and varying opinions on design principles hindered efficient design workflows.
To address these challenges, we adopted a three-step approach:
1. Research and Audit: We thoroughly examined our existing design system, identifying its strengths and weaknesses.
2. Establish Guiding Principles: We defined core principles to guide our design decisions.
Empowering: Bold visuals and clear typography. Spotlight on the user through product visuals.
Engaging: Moments of personalization, micro interactions.
Inclusive: Accessible design practices, customization (light/dark modes, content scaling, notification options etc.)
Fun: Playful icons, product visual and friendly tone of voice.
Accommodating: Flexible and responsive UI, feedback patterns.
3. Collaboration and Iteration: We collaborated closely with designers, engineers, and product managers to apply these principles and refine the design system through rigorous testing and iteration.
By following this approach, we've significantly improved the consistency, efficiency, and quality of our design process. Our revamped design system has led to a 35% increase in development time, enabling our team to create several new user-friendly products that align with our brand identity.
My Role
I had a lot of fun master planning and leading the strategy for this project, orchestrating internal workshops to develop the common principles and foundation for user experience. I also set up our framework for creating components and documentation and finally, I designed our new icon set. Later on, once we started adding product illustrations and had to come up with a formula on how to scale them in product ecosystem, I wrote a brief blog post going over the process.
