Challenge

The banking group is undergoing a digital transformation – with fewer branches and more innovative digital projects to keep up with customer needs and fight off new challenger banks. But their 50 digital teams were working in isolation within the group’s sub-brands – each with their own tools, design elements, code libraries and documentation styles – and duplicating the same work. As the group prepared to grow its design and engineering teams, it needed a solid design foundation and shared way of working to ensure consistent, efficient and fast-paced design and development.

Solution

The result is an open, living design system: the Unified Design Framework. It not only collects all components, guidelines and processes across all of the group’s teams and brands, but facilitates feedback and discussion between them. To maintain and grow the system in the future, we helped establish a governance process and a new internal Design Standards team, with defined roles and responsibilities. By giving their teams ownership, and providing data to prove the value of a design system internally, we secured internal buy-in and successful adoption.

Impact

No longer working in isolation, teams now spend less time duplicating work and more time building great customer experiences.