Alloy Design Language System
A collective problem for all digital products is the quintessential speed to market.
One of the largest blockers to this speed is the collaborative demands placed on product teams. A developer can no longer make agnostic design choices regardless of end-users, nor do they have the time to continually build unique, one-off, components with every feature, product or iteration. This is compounded exponentially when a team of developers is involved.
A designer cannot provide senseless designs without any consideration for technical constraints. Neither the designer nor the developer have the time for constant questioning, considerations and needed concessions to get a high-quality product shipped to eager customers.
Aktana's design structure for their products had an inconsistent visual communication and user experience. Operating without reusable components and a lack of clear standards, Aktana was building applications and features as one-off projects where design was an afterthought. This led to slower development and build process, more complicated QA testing and an inconsistent product workflow.
By implementing an atomic-based design system, applications can be built with ease by assembling a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards. The design team was able to quickly piece together the required components in a format that the developer can easily understand and use with minimal back and forth using a design system.
Throughout the process of creating the design system, I worked with the Director of Product Design to set up Alloy using the InVision Design System Manager platform, collaborated with the Senior Product Designer to build out the component library, improved the product development process by communicating component library updates to Front-End Engineers and ensured that the design, documentation and version control of Alloy was up to date every month.
The Alloy Design Language System was created to reflect the patterns and components that underpin the Aktana product offering. These patterns and components provide a unified language and consistent look and feel when designing apps and products within the Aktana ecosystem.