When I joined the team in 2018 I quickly realized that the design process needed a complete overhaul. The company was still using Adobe Photoshop for designing highly complex applications and handing off PDFs to developers. These practices were very inefficient and hurt the quality of the applications.

After presenting Figma and a design system as possible solutions I was given the opportunity to present my case. Over a period of approximately 2 weeks, I documented every problem and/or style I could find to get a better picture of the task at hand. After doing this, with the help of Josh Delgado (Software Engineer), we consolidated styles, defined essential components, and aligned our UI Library in Figma with our codebase.

Since then we have completely converted to Figma as our main design tool which has incredibly benefited the efficiency and quality of our work. We designed a system that is able to adapt to the needs of any new products. Yet flexible enough to be updated and add new components to our arsenal. Now we can revise and ship products with greater confidence.

This project was a super valuable learning experience. It is very easy to lose focus if there isn’t a source of truth. Creating this system eliminated so much guesswork and redundancy. We took all of our learnings from the first version and built a more in-depth version that is used as the source of truth for the entire team.