Creating a Multi-Brand Design System for a Leading Healthcare Provider: A UX Case Study
My team and I were responsible for documenting the design system of the leading healthcare HMO provider in the United States as the UX Team Lead at Accenture. The client, the nation’s largest integrated health system with over 11.8 million members and 200 thousand employees, desired to engage its members and improve patient care across mobile and desktop experiences.
Our team of six UX and visual designers, as well as engineers, worked with the client’s internal team to develop a multi-brand design system from the ground up. Within the client’s design ecosystem, the goal was to unite global teams around a common design language foundation. Our efforts resulted in the documentation of a system with over 100 standard user interface components that could be shared across Design Centers and Products.
We also achieved a 40% increase in consistency and parity across mobile, desktop, and physical channels, as well as a 3x increase in prototyping speed for the design team by creating a UI Kit with detailed usage instructions and redline specifications.
Following the initial release of the library, 86% of the design team agreed that the client required a design system. Half of the designers polled used our advice to help them make design decisions. Our work has been called “a single source of truth” and “well-implemented, easy to use, and feels like flying compared to some of the pattern library setups I’ve seen in the past.”
The Design System Team is responsible for creating visions and guiding user experience design principles. It is made up of professionals from various backgrounds and nationalities who are experts in interaction design, graphic user interface design, and product management.
We conducted a resource audit and component prioritization to create the design system, consolidated all designs into one library, and created several design resources for the team throughout the project, including a master sketch file and a Design System Website.
The team’s main accomplishment was a mindset shift – we trained the team on how to be a partner to all of the different design Centers and prioritize the needs of the user and the product. Our efforts reduced project onboarding and ready-to-work time by 65%, and the team became self-managed, capable of assisting and being assigned to specific projects, and ready to establish direct communication with the client without the use of intermediaries.