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Creating a design system for an agency

UX Design

Project Details

Project Goals:

The goal for this design system was to collaborate with a developer to create a style sheet and component library for medium fidelity Adobe XD wireframes at an agency. It was also a priority to keep branding ambiguous the agency's many clients with different branding and to optimize design and usability on desktop and mobile.

Tools:
  • Figma
  • Adobe XD
Role:
  • UX Architect / Strategist
Team:
  • Mindy Kilgore
  • John Behn
Duration:
  • 1 year
  • January 2024 - January2025

Planning

The Challenge:

The design system was to be used with many clients in many industries, all with different branding, so this design system needed to serve as a template for medium fidelity wireframes and prototypes for clients. I had old wireframes created by the developer for reference, but no access to a style guide. The previous file was started in Adobe XD, which does not have responsive design tools that are as robust as Figma.

Approach:

I aimed to create the following in Adobe XD, then do the same in Figma with more responsive components with auto-layout:

  • a style guide
  • common UI components
  • a pattern library
  • layout grids
  • icon pack (dark & light mode)
  • border radius guidelines
  • state changes and hovers
  • in-page annotations

Research

I researched comprehensive lists of all common component types and variations on Apple Human Interface Guidelines and Google Material Design 3.

User Interviews

Pain Points

Persona

User Journey

Information Architecture

Storyboarding

Sketches

Lofi Wireframes

Preview of icon library dark and light mode
Style guide
I created over 200 unique components, only a small percentage are shown here.

Lofi Prototype

Hifi Prototype

All components were created to be fully responsive in Figma Auto layout and resize for different screen sizes.

Components with different variants were coded to toggle on and off different elements within the component.

Interactive components also were designed to include hover states, tab focus states, inactive states, and alternative designs.

Usability Testing

Insights

Benefits:

  • Quicker wires, ability to replicate designs quickly with premade components.
  • Responsive components that resize for multiple breakpoints and screen sizes.
  • Components that can quickly be customized.
  • Eliminate any inconsistency in medium fidelity wireframe style.
  • Documentation for use cases and interactions for components.
  • Templates for creating style guides and designs systems for clients in their branding.

Hifi Prototype version 2

Iteration

Demo Video

Project Images

Accessibility Considerations

  • AA color contrast
  • Responsive design for viewing from different screen sizes
  • 190x45px touch target for buttons
  • Viewable from screen reader
  • Designed to be focusable using tabbed navigation

Takeaways & Next Steps

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