Foundry – GoCanvas Design System
DATE
December 2019 to present
MY ROLE
Lead UX Designer
OVERVIEW
Given that we are a growing company that is undertaking large initiatives, I realized there was an opportunity to streamline our design process. As a small UX team, our workload was growing and moving at a fast pace so we needed to accommodate our processes to keep up. Working with a UI Designer, I spearheaded the creation of the Foundry (the name we gave our design system) to help ensure we were delivering consistent designs fast.
CHALLENGE
The key design challenge for building out this design system was that we had to ensure we designed for our existing UI but also the rebranded UI. We were concurrently working on two UI styles for our public website, web, mobile web, Windows app, and mobile (iOS and Android). Additionally, there was no established style guide or design system of any sort, so we were starting from scratch.
SOLUTION
Foundry is the result of 4 weeks of heads down work done by myself and a UI designer. We built a design system that established principles, instructions, foundations like colors and typography, and over 20 components. This was built in Sketch for the design team (and eventually transitioned over to Figma) and built in Storybook for the development team.
IMPACT
The impact of Foundry was immediately felt. We were able to increase the rate at which we were delivering mockups, reduce the back and forth between developers and designers, and jumpstart the development team to start building out design tokens for the components we designed. The development team has implemented Foundry across all scrum teams over the span of several months helping create consistency across our product.
To measure the feasibility of Foundry, the design and development teams used it to build out our new Wartime Management product offering; COVID-19 Employee Screening. Check out that project here.
Although we still have a lot of “clean up” to do and Foundry is a continuous WIP, there has been overwhelming support for this initiative across the company.
