Building a design system to enable experience quality at scale
Following rapid consolidation of the print and digital communication surface industry in the nordics, Grano Group had a variety of digital products and services that were often developed silos. Grano Design System was built to enable experience quality at scale by aligning teams, technologies and processes.
Background
When we began planning the system around 2018, Grano had a variety of digital products and services, each developed in isolation, resulting in a complex and inefficient service architecture, as well as fragmented and inconsistent experience for customers and internal user groups.
Approach and role of design team
As the project lead, my role was to ensure a clear vision and team alignment. I worked on various levels and project stages with very hands-on approach. In our design team, we built foundational knowledge of design systems, sought best practices from global leaders, and tailored solutions for Grano, assessing risks and securing stakeholder buy-in.We were able to validate our approach and hypothesis, and gained support from stakeholders. We developed an understanding of our development practices, technologies, and technical architecture. We successfully pitched this to our CDO at the time and received green light.
Desired benefits for stakeholders
Customers: A consistent experience across all digital products, services, and touch points, positively impacting brand perception and overall customer experience.
Developers: Shared components, documentation and unified architecture make development work efficient and help getting new team members up to speed.
Designers: Standardized design components and guidelines to streamline design work.
Development partners: Facilitates onboarding, accelerates ramp-up time, and clarifies project direction.
Product and service teams: Increased efficiency, speed, and reduced lead times. Promotes cross-functional collaboration, bringing people and teams together.
Business: Cost savings, improved efficiency, break down silos, enhances customer experience, and strengthens employer branding.
Challenges
Because of the organization’s low maturity, we faced strong resistance particularly from older teams using legacy technologies, so we had to evangelize a lot. Multiple co-operation negotiations and organizational turbulence added to challenges, but we recovered and progressed.
Current status (2020)
Design system is implemented in My Grano customer facing touch points, administrator service and identity & access management service. Design team has component and style library in Figma, component work stream is established and has it’s own project in Jira & Confluence. UX Engineer from design team owns the system and facilitates component creation. Teams are committed to contribute and implement. Great learnings has been made. We need to work together to define the future vision and strategy for the system, and we need to be able to measure its impact. To enable this, we need to build our group level CX vision & strategy reaching out to at least few years future.
Outputs & Evidence
