By Insight Editor / 28 Feb 2022 / Topics: Data and AI Application development
Facts at a glance
Client industry
Beverage
Challenge:
The client needed to spin up applications quickly while delivering brand-compliant visuals and a consistent user experience.
Solution:
- Globally distributed design system
- Centrally defined user experience
- Template source code
Outcomes:
Download the client story
- Consistent brand visuals and experience across new apps
- Faster time to market
- Improved collaboration and knowledge
- Time and cost savings
When it comes to a brand, employees and customers expect consistent experiences. From the layout of a menu to the effect of a hovering mouse over a button, these details shape brand familiarity and impact usability. But without proper guidelines in place, delivering consistent experiences becomes hit or miss.
An alcoholic beverage conglomerate with product teams and contractors dispersed around the world faced this challenge. While IT teams were deploying new applications at a high velocity, irregularities were continuously bubbling up — slowing delivery and diluting the brand.
Management realized the company brand guidelines, which set the standard for its visual identity, fell short of the design minutia required by its technical design and development teams. The company’s experience design toolkit and brand standards didn’t include digital elements, such as menu placement, button interactions or other specifications, for easy reference by all development and design teams.
A lack of clearly articulated global visual language and standards led to duplicated efforts, reduced startup velocity and reliance on “tribal knowledge.” With every development project, different developers were spinning up their own development environments from scratch — creating inconsistent user interface approaches and a lot of wasted effort recreating code.
Over a span of 22 weeks, Insight worked with a beverage company product owner in an Agile framework to develop a global design system.
The design system serves as a single source of truth for the brand. It encompasses a holistic and detailed set of brand guidelines, from the brand philosophy and principles to components for web and native user interfaces. This ensures all applications have the same look and functionality for a consistent User Experience (UX).
The system also speeds development for the client’s design teams by providing a templated, packaged code framework. This gives designers the basic ingredients to begin developing a new application quickly.
Insight worked closely with the client to land on the most appropriate technology stack for its needs. We helped the company build a UX stack comprised of Sketch, InVision® and Abstract®. The client also decided on a development stack with Azure® DevOps, Wordpress®, Synfusion, Xamarin®, Android Material Design and iOS® standards.
Our work with the company resulted in a design system with clear but flexible standards, allowing globally distributed development teams to create a range of internal apps while still adhering to a centrally defined brand.
The return on investment is ongoing, driven by increased speed to market, enhanced product value, greater collaboration and knowledge sharing between teams — and less time and money wasted.
Creating a design system gave the company a shared visual language to develop consistent experiences across applications and geographies. Already experiencing significant wins from the design system, the client is committed to another phase of development to extend the solution further.
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