Since I joined Ework Group in 2020, I was observing inconsistencies all over the place – no matching colors and styles, and different experiences where they are supposed to be similar. Also, the design and the development processes looked like they could be streamlined. The former design team was using Sketch but there was no shared library, so it was taking hours to design any new view. In mid-2020 I finally managed to convince C-level that we should build a design system. A tool that would serve all of our other products.

We took one of our products that looked the most prominent and used it as a base for visuals. I took the role of a Product Owner and a Design Lead. All 5 designers contributed to the project. Almost all of our Frontend Developers joined the struggle (9 people). Spending a day per week, in just a few first months we managed to build a library that consisted of:

• 60+ accessible components,
• 20+ patterns,
• 150+ icons,
• 70+ colors and content guidelines,
• ~75% of the views across 5 applications.

Designing a new view in Figma now takes minutes. Building a view using coded components is also approximately 5 times faster. The views and the experience are now consistent as never before.

The library can be accessed via iris.eworklabs.io – please note there is a limited number of patterns and a lack of docs, which have been never published in Storybook.