PDI Design System
Strategy / Research / Design / Product Mnagment
SOLUTION
PDI Technologies is a collection of companies that have been acquired over a span of time. This resulted in each sub segment and product having different designs and experiences, resulting in inconsistent experiences for customers. Additionally, the majority of the products where built on older frameworks and were not responsive or mobile friendly.
Create a design system on a common framework that would help foster a shared language, unify the different products and make it easier for product teams to build applications without having to rebuild the same components multiple times over.
RESEARCH
The first process was getting a good baseline on what frameworks teams were currently using, what they would be willing to move to if they decided to upgrade. This process entailed interviewing development leads and sending out surveys. From that survey, Angular became the most common framework teams preferred for their upgrade path.
I researched well-known design systems, like Material Design and IBM Carbon, to understand the taxonomy these companies used for naming components, how they grouped components together and what those groups were named to aid in finding the right one.
Afterwards, I proceeded to do a product audit to uncover all the current components that were being used in the respective products along with understanding the experiences. I was also able to speak to customers and developers for some products that helped us gain even more insight on common pain points that existed across multiple product lines. With this knowledge, I was able to start building the pilot iteration of the design and released it to teams for consumption.
OUTCOME
With the Design System in place, development velocity has increased for projects using the design system. We have helped foster a shared language and a consistent unified look among the products with applications now being built with mobile in mind with 14 plus teams currently using the library in some capacity.
As more teams used it, our Design System team continued to engage with product teams to uncover more ways to improve the system, like having component guidelines, doing a competitive audit against Kendo UI (a common library amongst our teams) to create parity, making installation and upgrades easier and adding release notes with more frequent releases.
