When I came to Clumio, the biggest hole in its UX development process was its lack of a design system. Without any ready-made components or templates, the team spent a lot of time duplicating work, mockups were inconsistent from one designer to another, and we had endless discussions where the same UX issues were brought up over and over. All of this caused delay and made the UX team a bottleneck in the software development process.
When I took over as Director of Product Design, I made the design system a priority, oversaw its creation, wrote many of the guidelines myself, and drove the team to make decisions on the rest.
Under my direction, the team developed a Figma library with a rich set of components and templates, from simple elements like text blocks and status indicators to complex components like data grids and our backup calendar.
Later I oversaw a round of "user testing" with the designers as participants, to make sure the toolkit made them faster and more productive.
Using a tool called ZeroHeight that was designed for this purpose, I oversaw the creation of a complete set of guidelines for each component, covering usage and best practices for each one.
ZeroHeight also allowed us to integrate our design guidelines with the UI developers' React components, allowing our design system to be a tool not just for designers but for front-end developers.
Our design system included UX standards that spanned components, such as formatting, error handling, and overflow.
I worked with the documentation team to include standards for written content in the design system, and with the marketing team to include brand identity.
This made sure a customer had a consistent experience across the entire lifecycle of their interaction with Clumio.
My decision to invest in Clumio's design system paid huge dividends. Not only did it make our UX designers faster and our designs more consistent, it became the source of truth for our developer components and our customer-facing language, ensuring a better experience for customers and reducing the time spent on discussion and churn within the company.
