Creating consistency and trust with a design system
FlowEQ had been built without a design system, and tech & design debt were piling up. I created and helped the team adopt a design system.
Product manager, 2 engineers, 1 designer (me)
design system
April 2023 - August 2023
When I joined FlowEQ as the first design hire, multiple MVPs were live and in use. Making changes was costly and making new features was a lot of work. Our customer success team spent a lot of time helping users confused by inconsistencies throughout the products. Every surface needed a redesign to make FlowEQ into a cohesive experience, plus there were new features planned. We needed a way to move through these projects faster.
Limitations:
Product is already deployed and in use
Development bandwidth to implement is limited
The product is large, and I am the sole designer
I advocated for adopting a design system. The team was already using MUI’s react component library, so I proposed to adapt the corresponding MUI Figma design system.
After a low-touch brand refresh, I set about translating and applying that brand to the components. I created color scales and designated color tokens, and adjusted MUI’s rather generous padding to suit our more task and information dense tools.
To foster adoption by our dev team, I needed to lower the barrier of entry to the system and Figma in general.
I color coded our apps, and made a consistent set of pages with specific purposes inside each file. The default page of each file is titled "Ready for dev".
