US Bank
I lead an effort to consolidate and elevate a multi-team design effort into a single organized language. The main output of this was to be a Style Guide & Component Library that could be shared with all the design and development teams.
Too many cooks…
US Bank launched a massive effort to reinvent their mobile app to create a market leading platform for all of their banking users. This effort is still ongoing and continues to evolve over their 3 year engagement with Sapient. When the project kicked off the scope of the work continued to expand to demand 6 different design and development teams across Minneapolis, Atlanta, San Francisco and India.
Problems of Scale
The scale of work and the fast pace started to create problems for the project. Design and interaction patterns started to become inconsistent as each team brought new ideas to the table but were unable to coordinate all decisions with other teams.
This work needed to be accomplished very quickly as the design teams were already working on parts of the app. The longer we took to establish the standards the more work there will be bringing everything into alignment down the line.
Deployment to the whole team
In the end a style guide is just a document. This suffers from everything from making sure it is shared properly to all the designers, versioning issues and oversight to ensure compliance with the updated design rules. All the teams were under pressure to produce work and following design rules would often not happen due to time constrains. We needed a better solution.
We set out to create a design library that we could manage and distribute automatically. There was no ideal solution within the sketch ecosystem. The app has library functionality but its capabilities are limited when distributing to a larger team. We ended up leveraging a platform from InVision call DSM (Design System Manager).
This system was also limited and a bit cumbersome in its implementation but it had one big benefit. The DSM could be distributed and update design components automatically. We could also setup releases to distribute to the teams while we worked on system additions from an editor permission level.
