iSolvRisk Inc.
Built from the ground up, a design system for a risk management app, reducing QA time by 3 hours per week and cutting implementation time by half.
Responsibilities
Design system, Product strategy
UI Design, Discovery, Illustrations,
Team
A 2-person team consisting of myself and the Lead Engineer, with collaboration from full-stack developers and the Head Designer.
Tools
Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, Asana, Slack, Maze
Category
Edtech
Timeline
5 months
Type of projects
Client
Impact
Reduced components variants by half
in design consistency, cut component variations from 120+ to 50 to simplify the system.
Saved 2h weekly in meetings and QA
in collaboration, reduced meetings and QA from 5 to 3 hours weekly through design standardization.
Accelerated implementation by 50%
in design-to-development implementation speed from 4 to 2 weeks.
Turned a fragmented UI into a cohesive design system to enhance thoughtful student decision-making.
iSolvRisk is a risk management app that empowers students to make informed decisions about their everyday choices and long-term career paths by visualizing potential outcomes. It bridges the gap between academic learning and real-world application, equipping users with essential decision-making skills for today’s dynamic workforce.
To effectively lead this project and satisfy project goals, I had to advocate for a design system. Based on interviews with developers, designers, and the CEO, I identified a lack of consistency and scalability across the product. I led the creation of a scalable design system in Figma, which streamlined collaboration, improved design efficiency, and laid a strong foundation for future product expansion. I also developed custom illustrations to support storytelling and boost user engagement.
Due to privacy constraints, I’m only able to share a limited portion of this work.
Led this 5-month project from research to UI redesign and build, collaborating closely with a lead engineer, head of design, and CEO who was representing the product.
Conducted interviews with stakeholders and discovered that significant inconsistencies in the design system result in severe misalignment, leading to poor UI consistency and inefficient product development.
I planned and conducted 8 remote interviews with 3 developers and 5 designers to investigate collaboration challenges and inconsistencies in our UI components. These conversations revealed gaps in alignment and a lack of shared processes between the design and engineering teams.
I uncovered misalignment between designers and developers, which led to inconsistency and rework:
If developers are unsure of what an existing component is and what it is not, they should reach out to ask for clarification. Currently, I guess that isn't happening, which is why some components are created from scratch.
"To be honest, the handoff process feels like a game of broken telephone."
- developer
Based on conversations and research, the following problems emerged:
Designers struggle to maintain consistency across different pages and features, leading to mismatched styles, fonts, and colors because the design system and documentation don't exist. That causes developers to be unsure about existing components, which leads to some components being created from scratch and leading to longer development cycles.
Problems
No single source of truth for components
Both teams recreated or interpreted components differently, leading to UI inconsistencies.
Poor communication and handoff process
Misalignment between designers and developers
Designers felt their intent was misunderstood; developers described it as a “game of broken telephone.”
Working in silos
Limited collaboration led to assumptions being made instead of clarifying, resulting in inefficiencies and rework.
Advocated for a design system by presenting UX pain points, developer bottlenecks, and brand inconsistencies to the CEO — secured executive approval to drive team alignment, faster delivery, and scalable UI standards
The team was focused on shipping features, but inconsistent UI and a lack of documentation led to design and dev inefficiencies. I defined a shared mission and advocated to the CEO using audit findings and team feedback. By highlighting the impact on velocity and product quality, I secured executive buy-in and carved out roadmap space. This laid the groundwork for a unified design system that improved consistency and accelerated delivery.
I started by defining a mission to align the team toward a common goal.
Mission statement
Empowering the product team to support current and future products by enhancing UI consistency and fostering seamless collaboration between designers and developers.
Conducted and documented an inventory of every UI element to gain insight into the current status of existing design elements.
I identified many inconsistencies in our design assets, highlighting the need for a more systematic approach to documenting, communicating, and setting up our design system.
Typography
Typography lacked hierarchy, with inconsistent fonts, sizes, and weights disrupting readability.
Colors
Colors were inconsistently applied, affecting brand identity and accessibility.
Components
Components lacked uniformity in styles and descriptions, making design cohesion difficult to maintain.
I identified inconsistencies in typography, layout, and navigation to shape the redesign strategy.
I redesigned the UI to support rebranding, enhance usability, and engage users through the use of illustrations.
At the CEO’s request and after uncovering key UI issues, I redesigned the interface to incorporate custom illustrations and a clear visual hierarchy. I selected this illustrative, minimalist style to spark curiosity, reduce cognitive load, and create an emotionally engaging experience. It aligns with the refreshed brand and space-themed narrative while supporting a more usable, accessible, and scalable product.
I built scalable design foundations from the ground up to ensure visual consistency with a custom token system.
After tidying things up, it was time to lay the foundations of our design system.
Ensuring a clean, consistent, and scalable design system that was uninfluenced by existing or outdated components.
These tokens defined the app's core visual language, ensuring consistency across UI components and enabling easier handoff to developers. Designers could use these guidelines to create new components (as seen in the images above) and expand the design system further. Here are some foundation pages that keep the team aligned.
I designed component architecture in Figma using a systematic approach from properties to variants.
Here is the process I followed when creating any components.
Examples
From atoms to a page. Why atomic design?
I created an atomic design system based on Brad Frost’s methodology to bring consistency and scalability to our product. By structuring components into atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages, we reduced UI inconsistencies, improved team alignment, and accelerated development with reusable building blocks.
Turned chaos into clarity: lessons learned from auditing and building a scalable design system
Within 5 months of assuming my role, we successfully built the design system in Figma from scratch, resulting in significant improvements in workflow efficiency and design quality. Design productivity increased, and handoff clarification meetings decreased. Here are the key insights I will bring to future projects:
Allocate more time for component audits when there’s no existing UI library or design system
Auditing components took more time than I anticipated, as the absence of a UI library or design system made it challenging to identify and resolve inconsistencies across the product.
Group elements by function, not by looks
I started by grouping elements based on visual similarity, which led to redundancy and confusion. By adopting an intent-driven approach that emphasized each component’s purpose, I streamlined the system, enhanced consistency, and aligned design with engineering, ultimately creating a more scalable and maintainable system.
Communication is key to building a scalable system
Regular check-ins and open discussions with designers and engineers helped surface hidden pain points and misaligned workflows. This collaboration clarified priorities, reduced rework, and ensured the system met the team's real needs, making it more scalable and effective in the long run.
