Case study

A new start for
a complex design system.

More than just components.

As the primary owner of the design system, I work directly with engineers on the core team, to manage contribution and governance. I act as the facilitator for the engineering stand-ups, prioritising the backlog into our sprints and collaborating with engineers on research projects and POCs that drive our system forward.

My strongest tool in maturing our design system has been fostering the right conversations. Outside of collaboration with product and engineering, integrating governance processes, and driving accessibility initiatives, I've also talked to every team in the business about the design system, from revenue to customer support. This emphasis on communication and collaboration drove us towards our roadmap goals in 2023, accelerating the feature delivery that unlocked international expansion and winning enterprise-level deals.

Aligning with the needs
of the product.

The above timeline shows the different touch points of the design system with various stakeholders at Semble. Part of my focus has been on identifying on-ramps for our design system to align with the roadmap by working closely with product and delivery managers.

By predicting upcoming needs, we've stayed one step ahead in the design systems team. From testing new UI patterns with users and iterating based on feedback, to working with developers to find open source software to enable faster and better results. We face an ongoing challenge of making sure that the design system can support the rapidly growing feature work teams.

Delivering benefits to UX and accessibility with design system as a must have spec

100% adoption

Driving decisions with data.

Data-informed design.

On the system's first audit, I utilised quantitative data to evaluate performance, because we needed to pinpoint key areas for improvement. I combined this data with desk research on industry-leading design systems, and qualitative research from surveys, testing, and interviews.

Some ways that I achieved sustained adoption:

  • Respond to queries in our help channel, where people request support with using the design system

  • Advocated for making adoption a must have in all specs for new features

  • Drove conversation about adoption numbers, with engineering and design

  • Introduced trialing analytics tools such as Omlet

  • Improved documentation and how this is presented, using Zeroheight and Storybook


Date of birth input

Feedback from users showed us that there were issues with the date of birth input, the input confused users and had poor validation. I designed the new input to be fully accessible, with comprehensive error messaging, and validation. This subsequently allowed the data team to eliminate errors in reports that were caused by users being able to enter symbols into the input.


Clear need for powerful data tables

I identified that several core features on our upcoming roadmap would benefit from an improved table component. I worked with developers to find headless open source tech (TanStack) that would enable us to deliver a powerful, accessible component complete with a beautiful design. This impacted several core features including data reporting, data migration and clinical workflows.

Driving decisions with data.

Bringing illustration to the UI.

An outsourced brief and series of recreations had left the illustrations across Semble in an inconsistent state. Prior to working as a designer, I have a background in painting and illustration, which enabled me to see opportunities for how illustration could enhance our UI.

I created an illustration system with 40+ unique illustrations that can be combined. Another perk of the system is that it's really easy to modify, so much so that non-designers on my team such as product managers and the head of marketing have been able to jump into Figma and adapt the illustrations for use.