A design system used by every product in the ecosystem — and a team to sustain it.
It was my first day at Accutech. My manager was showing me around our product ecosystem and I started noticing things — buttons looking drastically different, form fields with different error-message interactions, menus of all kinds functioning in odd ways, and an umpteen of other inconsistencies.
It was almost like Accutech never had a product designer on staff before (they hadn’t — that’s the joke), and I knew I had my work cut out for me.
The challenge, however, wasn’t solely inconsistency. The message I had to get across to leadership and the various teams was that every new variant of button, dropdown, or menu used across our ecosystem represented a real cost.
Each component we made from scratch or borrowed from a library carried the time to choose its styling and interactions, the time to code and implement it, and the time for QA to review and test its functionality and accessibility.
That’s when it clicked for folks. Everyone started to see this wasn’t just a UI/UX issue — it was a business issue with real financial impact.
Five years later (props to those who get the SpongeBob reference), we have a design system that all six products in our ecosystem use, two full-time developers on the Product Design team to support it, and over 80 unique, reusable components I designed — used in at least 3,000 instances across our products — along with design and development documentation guiding their implementation.
We’ve learned so much along the way and made our fair share of mistakes, but I couldn’t be more proud of the collective effort it took us to get here.
A small sample of the components we built from the ground up and continue to iterate on.
We didn’t just need to make things look more consistent. We needed to fundamentally change the way we build front-end interfaces.