Where the story began

When I was in charge of the project management for The Peninsula Website Re-Platform, I realised that design and development was not communicating effectively and the same problem happened between the designer and client as well. With the growing numbers of website pages and components, the challenges at that time was:

1. Long prototyping time due to inefficient and ineffective communication

2. No design operation and process was established

3. Design files were all over the place and no central place for archive

Approach

I am acting as a UX lead to lead the 3 UX/UI designers to build the design system :

1. Completed a thorough UI audit on colour, font, logo & components

2. Categorised the design elements into different labels

3. Archived all of the design files into Invision Design System

4. Expanded the design system from the main website to all other digital touch points.

5. Revisit and Update the Design System Library once a month

After the design system was built, designer can easily locate the right colour and font to do their job. And I expanded the practice not limited to design system but also shifting the design software from adobe AI/PS to Sketch and Invision so that the designer and developer can work seamlessly together via Invision comment and Inspect function.

Result

After the design system was built, the whole team, including client, designers and developers, has higher productivity and more agile than before. The whole web product development time was shorten as the gap between designer, developer and client was narrowed. The DesOps yielded desired outcomes. And this system keeps running until now.