DEVELOPING DESIGN SYSTEMS

Head of Design, Lumanu

2022

Background

When I came on board, Lumanu had a half-built homegrown design system. This continued to result in inconsistencies and inefficiencies in designing and development.

The case for a better design system

After conducting stakeholder interviews as I ramped up, I found allies across the company for this effort and was able to get it onto the roadmap by noting both end user trust and increased eng velocity in addition to other benefits: accessibility, scalability, and not having to rebuild the wheel every time we introduced a new feature. The design team partnered with a few engineering team members to evaluate component libraries and we eventually aligned on using Material UI, React Native and NextJS, and Storybook to document components. We developed an implementation plan by prioritizing containers and global components first.

We were able to launch our iOS and Android apps in one quarter with the new redesign, and eventually moved the web platform to the new system as well.

Impact

The Lumanu app is currently ranked at a 4.7 out of 5! 🎉