Project Background
Our web team within UHS manages over 200 websites. Many of these were launched more than 4 years ago, and use Content Management Systems that a number of people can access and make changes. Over time, a lot of variation cropped up in elements like buttons, headers, images, navigation, etc. Our team was tasked with coming up with a set of guidelines as a first step to creating a design system that our team would use for future upgrades and new websites.
Objective
Document the current range of design elements present on UHS web pages. Use it to create a new set of guidelines going forward, documenting do’s and don’ts, which could serve as a reference for the entire team.
Team Members
- Myself, conducting audits, writing guidelines, facilitating working sessions with our team
- Shayne Eisenhauer, UX Design Lead
- Caren Lipkin, Design Manager
- Scudder Stevens, Developer
My Role
The lack of standardization of design elements on our pages, as well as a lack of documentation was something that became more frustrating to me over time. I was happy when team’s manager assigned this to our team, and took it on as a project I was particularly invested in. I created a roadmap of steps in the project with points for team reflection, and ended up doing the majority of the auditing work and presenting that to higher ups. I also facilitated multiple team work sessions and designed and launched an initial survey to gather insights from our other design partners.
My Take-Aways
In the end this project got a bit side-lined because of changes in management of our team. There wasn’t the same drive to complete it once our manager was promoted to a different position in the company. Though our team continued working on it, the timeline expanded quite a bit. When we were about 9 months into the project, our team was merged with another part of the company, where their approach to a design system was much different. We had a few discussions about how the documentation work was still valuable and could be built upon, but it was a little sad we didn’t have a final reference site as we had envisioned. I hope it can still serve as an example of my personal drive to work on a project and get it as close to a finished product without close management supervision.