CultureAI Design System
In close collaboration with engineers, I built a scalable design system from scratch, ensuring a consistent user experience, streamlined workflows and built trust across CultureAI’s ecosystem.
Overview
As startups grow, maintaining consistency across a large, complex SaaS platform can be tough, and CultureAI was experiencing exactly this. Engineers were building components from scratch and visual consistency was taking a hit. As the sole designer, my goal was to create a shared language that meant even when I wasn't there, good decisions were made. This project was a first for CultureAI and involved creating UX patterns, rules, logic and tokens from scratch, with lots of cross-functional collaboration and testing.
A shared language
Building a shared language between design and enginerring meant aligning primitive values from Tailwind into Figma and then assigning some of these to common use cases based on their intent. This allowed developers to easily identify what values to use, without the need for design support.
Careful craft
Considering every variant, interaction and usage guideline for all 57 components dramatically reduced errors, leading to users that trusted the product, and developers that trusted what was being built, something pivotal in high stakes cybersecurity environments.
Improving speed
By creating extensive variables in Figma, designs could be mocked up much faster and components updated with ease. The system also enabled us to feed our design language directly into AI tools, generating prototypes that look more like our own, and at speed. Also, engineers said new features now take ~15% less time to build.
What I learnt
True design craft isn't just about beautiful interfaces; it's about creating the invisible infrastructure that enables people to focus on what matters most. It also taught me how important collaboration is from the start. Considering edge cases, different screen sizes and error states dictate how a component is designed, and aligning on these things early saved lots of time and effort.
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