Axos legacy design system assessment

When first tasked to manage and maintain the design system, I began by inventorying what was currently in circulation. I found the following and decided on what to keep and what needed to be revised.

• Outdated and unfollowed style guide

  • The style guide was not created with digital products in mind. Some fonts were not web-friendly, the secondary color was non-ADA compliant on white backgrounds, and it already had a dated look and feel. We moved away from it and created a new look and feel.

• Color pallet from the style guide

• Desktop/mobile grid

• Iconography library

  • A previous designer had created a new iconography library that we decided to set as our new standard.

• Logos

• Typography scale

  • After encountering problems with previous fonts, the team created a new type scale using approved Google websafe fronts. We continued to use this scale going forward.

• Few components

  • We began with these components and modified them as needed. Our library was built in Figma, so we would refactor them to incorporate new features as they were released for quality-of-life updates. unfortunately, the components had no documentation and were being used in different ways, overwritten or rebuilt

    • input field general

    • buttons

    • checkbox

    • radio button

    • switch

Establishing early design ops

After auditing and taking inventory, my next step was to talk with the team. I wanted to research and empathize, so to speak, by conducting interviews individually and in pairs to understand what was happening. I better understood how the team was functioning as a whole and the pain points we were experiencing. I looked at it through the lens of the 4 phases of team development. Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. Our team was in a Storming phase with miscommunications, misunderstandings, and finger-pointing between departments for faults. Many of our designers were junior-level and straight out of college or boot camps; their knowledge and experience of a design system were limited.

My next step was to create buy-in and educate the team. I shared with them the scope and strategy for scaling up, focused on the obvious struggles, identified the most significant hurdles and pain points, and began treating them as the priority. In proposing solutions, the team had an opportunity to assist in solutions and give them partial ownership as we grew. We will also come across the name of our design system soon, Ft Knox.