Crafting EXOS Design System
The EXOS Design System is a continuously evolving guide developed by the UX/UI team to streamline product design for the EXOS platform. Its primary goal is to enhance efficiency and consistency across all teams, ensuring a cohesive and scalable approach to product development.
Building a large-scale software platform like EXOS requires collaboration among many teams over time. This often leads to challenges like unclear documentation, inconsistent communication, and knowledge gaps. When developing new features, teams frequently face the dilemma of whether to reuse existing resources or start from scratch—both of which can slow down progress or result in inconsistency.
The EXOS Design System solves these issues by providing a single, central location where teams can reference, share, reuse, and contribute to commonly used patterns and elements, enabling faster and more unified development.
Creating a central hub for all product and development teams to access and contribute to standardized UI/UX patterns, ensuring design consistency and efficiency across EXOS.
Inconsistencies Across 20+ Projects: There were significant design variances across different teams and projects, leading to a disjointed user experience.
Accessibility Issues: Many designs failed to meet accessibility standards, which impacted usability for all users.
Standardization Complexity: Each project had varying business requirements, making it difficult to standardize components without sacrificing flexibility.
Audit and Identify Components: We began by conducting a comprehensive audit to identify reusable components across all projects that needed standardization.
Prioritize Features: Using dependency analysis and an effort/value graph, we prioritized which components and features to standardize first based on their impact and effort required.
Continuous Improvement: To ensure the design system remained relevant and adaptable, we held weekly collaborative workshops with cross-functional teams to refine components, improve documentation, and maintain alignment across projects.
The EXOS Design System has become the central source of truth for all product and development teams, dramatically improving consistency and reducing inefficiencies across 20+ projects. Teams now have access to standardized patterns and components, leading to faster development cycles, improved accessibility compliance, and a more cohesive user experience across the platform.
