MUFG and Union Bank, the second largest global banking group, engaged our team to help transform their entire software delivery process. As part of the transformation team, I served as senior experience director and product owner leading a cross functional design system team tasked with bringing consistency, quality, and speed to digital products across the organization and across multiple brands.
Design and implementation
Starting from an existing but limited design library from another agency, our team of UX designers, content strategists, and front end developers designed and built out a comprehensive enterprise design system complete with design principles, a full pattern library, and a robust collection of dev components built in both Angular and React.
Using a product and customer driven development model, new design and development was based on the agile priorities of individual product teams and then extended based on user research and feedback from the larger stakeholder audience. Design system components and patterns were made available in multiple branded themes and with robust configuration options suitable for teams delivering a range of products from native mobile apps for consumers to large scale B2B enterprise applications.
Governance and spreading adoption
To ensure the design system was being used consistently and effectively, we established a governance structure that included regular review sessions, office hours, and a request intake process. We also created a centralized design system process and component documentation sites to make it easy for product owners, designers, and developers to access and use the system. The guidelines went beyond redlines and helped teams understand the whys and hows of each component and pattern as well.
Without full enforcement power, marketing the system to new teams and communicating its benefits and continuous updates was critical to the success of the team and of the design system itself. I worked regularly with leadership, technical product owners, and business stakeholders throughout the organization to discuss the benefits of adoption and take in feedback to continue to improve the system.
Results and handoff
The design system was eventually adopted successfully by teams in multiple business units working on products ranging from native consumer mobile products to large scale enterprise internal tools. Despite lacking a usage mandate from executives, the system still was able to spread naturally as development teams discussed the many benefits it brought including consistency, efficiency, and overall user experience. At the end of the multiyear engagement we successfully embedded client team members within our team and were able to handoff ownership of the system to an internal team.