designing a scalable design system for B2B & B2C product portfolio

Project type
Design System
Year
2019 - 2021 (ongoing effort throughout my time at Welltok)
Role
Senior Product Designer, lead the project after 2020

The product

Welltok's B2B & B2C products, including Welltok Central, CaféWell Itinerary & Reawrds, Patientology and more.

The challenge

With 7 acquisitions by Welltok between 2010 and 2018 clients using Welltok's products don't have a cohesive design experience. Additionally, there were few core components built for reuse for either designers or developers to rely on as a source of truth, losing both time and consistency.

Design assets when I began at Welltok

The definition and documentation of the design system were still relatively exploratory at the beginning of this project but as a redesign of the entire consumer-facing product CaféWell was prioritized, as the lead designer, I pioneered all-new styles, components, and patterns for the updated user experience by evolving our design system, Elevate. The challenge throughout the early stages of the project and design system were to ramp up quickly to define & standardize a working design system for both designers and developers to refer to maintain consistency and increase efficiency.

The goal

Create a scalable design system of components with documentation that can create a cohesive design experience for internal and external users as well as streamline development work.

As both projects evolved, I was able to expand on components beyond immediate use and relied heavily on our design system documentation for communication with developers so I could streamline both time and Figma design files.

Audit and prioritize

Core components across Welltok's products were audited and prioritized to begin defining styles & building atomic components that would be most often reused.

Early organization and priorization of Welltok's first design components

In addition to styles & core components that would be used repeatedly throughout a product, I also considered patterns which would be recurring elements made up of multiple components or behaviors that core components would have across products.

Explore & build UI components

When building out new components & patterns there were several things that were considered for each new addition to the library:

  • Accessibility
  • Scalability & flexibility
  • Functional
  • High visual quality
  • Mobile responsive (to both web & native iOS & Android)

Design impact: As the component library on Figma grew, design efficiency increased, I was able to focus on higher level UX design flows instead of recreating components across pages or responsive sizes.

Documentation

As the design system grew, I focused heavily on documentation. Creating clearly labeled Figma files to organize all components in a shared & public space on Figma helped teams grow familiar with existing components, their build status, and leave feedback.

I also began to document the guidelines and uses of the elements in Zeroheight, an online document accessible by anyone in the company. This document served as an invaluable resource for myself and the developers as we collaborated to build these components out on CaféWell as they were able to inspect spacing, size, color, accessibility considerations as well as expected behavior.

Implementation and impact

I worked closely with developers to build out many functional components that appeared in CaféWell’s redesigned UI & UX experience and beyond. We continued to collaborate on additional HTML/CSS/JS components for all variants so that they could be documented on Zeroheight to ensure continued proper adoption beyond the Product Team.

I also generated a backlog of prioritized components and patterns to build out in Figma and document on Zeroheight based on upcoming needs in future iterations.

This design system was a continued & ongoing project and many of the components were adopted by other designers on the team in other Welltok products.