Design System: Patient Theme

Over the past year, I have helped to implement a new core design system to run through all patient experiences at my company. Through this work, I helped to define the core components, prioritize the work, define component requirement, and create a theme for patient components that will be used across all patient products. There are now 50 enterprise products beginning to uptake our component library.

Role:

Senior product designer

Timeline:

Jan 2023 – Dec 2023

Platform:

React Native

Business Justification

Understanding the problem

For the past 5 years, IQVIA lacked any formalized design system. Brands existed on the web as separate identities with individual teams creating their own source of standards for UI elements, components, or modules–in both internal or outside agencies.

What we found:

  • Conflicting guidelines and direction

  • Duplication of common components

  • Inconsistencies across market websites and applications

  • Pressure for agile solutions without discovery and research

  • Siloed teams working with disjointed communication

Roadblocks & Challenges

Piecemeal approaches to website technology and design have created fragmented workflows and inconsistent brand experiences across the globe.

01. Global

With 80k employees seated throughout 60 countries involved in hundreds of product implementations, we needed a system that can manage a diverse cultural and language range. This paradigm was made more complicated by white labeled or client-centered work.

02. Accessible

With accessibility compliance laws varying from market to market, we wanted to focus our system around WCAG 2.1. We referenced other leading systems (MUI, HIG, Lightning) to ensure we were approaching accessibility holistically.

03. Flexible

Our company supports thousands of clinical trials a year. Across all our brands we had to ensure maximum flexibility of components while delivering patterned solutions in an agile framework.

Enhancements

The initial release of the system had less components than our team had originally planned, but the ones we support are really high-quality. We build a white-label design system entirely from scratch, and already have a pipeline of 10 products that are ingesting our components for an initial release.

We effectively built a white-label design system from the ground up, implemented 14 brands into their own related systems, educated and led teams across the organization on web accessibility and the value of a common design language.

Reflection

Looking back at the successes and the losses, we learned some valuable lessons:

  • Design systems are always changing. They are living systems that require a dedicated team actively involved in their growth and maintenance. Facilitating adoption and cross-team buy-in is a challenge worth undertaking that ensures we all are presenting a common design language, that is familiar and consistent for any person interacting with it.

  • Accessibility is MVP. Defining accessibility requirements and getting buy-in at all levels of the organization from the beginning will directly impact those difficult feature and enhancement conversations later down the line.

  • Design systems are products. Our design organization really had to step into a 'product owner' relationship with this development and balance the needs of a lot of parties. While we want everyone to be happy with the outcome, it was a lot of work to prioritize 'core' work from work that should be dealt with as customizations based on narrow use cases.