Design strategy
Creating a completely new design system is a huge undertaking. In order to structure our sprints to meet deadlines, we broke up the design system into more manageable milestones:
• Color mapping
• Grid system
• Typography
• Components
• Documentation & Hand off
Research
Identifying UX inconsistencies
We worked with a third party research team, Concrete, to uncover challenges that we needed to solve for. We found opportunities to standardize patterns, styling, and interactions, andimprove overall visual design and branding. Other benefits we foresaw were to improve design production and overall production speed.
Ideation
How we produced and executed our designs
I was responsible for scaling our components across the different product suites. I started by assembling our foundational elements together and building as units to create components, larger groups of components, and eventually templates that housed individual components.
I collaborated with our Product (Healthcare PM's) and Tech (Engineering Director, Engineers) partners to understand requirements and constraints that would impact our designs and deadlines.
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User Testing
Did our new design system resonate with our customers?
We partnered with Concrete to create a buyer validation study. Concrete reached out to 8 target purchasers, and interviewed the buyers about their experience with our current system and compared it to the new experience. They also used Microsoft Desirability Toolkit to do emotional resonance testing. In our findings, our customers only chose positive adjectives to describe our design system, and were excited about the overall design direction.
The Impact
The Velocity Design System was launched Q1 of 2021.
We introduced Velocity the beginning of 2021, and is currently being implemented in over 20 products since the release. Over the year of 2021, our revenue grew by over 9% and our customer satisfaction score increased by 2%, we can assume that some of this can be attributed to the new Design System.
This new design system brings additional benefits to our organization internally:
1. Creating room for innovation: Designers can iterate on new experiences faster when we don’t have to build up common interactions from scratch every time.
2. Streamlining communication within our Organization: Brings cohesion in how we speak about our products across the organization.
3. Increasing efficiency and decreasing time to ship: Velocity Design system is utilized by our Platform team and is currently rolled out across all our product suites (20+ Healthcare, Financial Institutions, and Higher education products), and we already have seen improvements in time to ship features.
Customer anecdotes
“...much better and faster than Performance Manager. He said with PM he would write a report and check on it a few hours later. Now he gets it in 15-20 seconds. Couldn’t be happier.”
“Current process requires heavy manual work - having this streamlined digital process is great.”
“This is awesome, this is exactly what I want to see and this will probably save me a weeks’ worth of work.”
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