Park Street delivers productivity-enhancing and cost-saving back-office solutions, advisory services, and working capital to more than 1,000 alcoholic beverage brands from the U.S. and around the world. The company was launched in 2003 and is headquartered in Miami, FL with operations across the U.S. and E.U. Park Street’s Mission: To help emerging and established alcoholic beverage companies build and manage successful brands by providing innovative solutions and exceptional service.
During a first 2 month of work with Park Street Companies as a UX Designer I discovered a huge gap in development process related to lack of consistency in design elements. Company has a tons of back end tools that serves different types of clients and perform various of functions but UI wise all this tools has set of similar features and components which are repetitive. Design and development team has no source of truth of all design elements in order to develop these tools in faster and more productive manner. Font families, colors, layouts were different from screen to screen. Developers needed very complex handoff documentation in order to understand design and implement it on their's end.
The global goal was to create one source of truth for all design components and create a clear picture of how digital product should look like. I had to create a complete design system that includes: colors, typography, illustrations, atomic and other design elements that can be used for creation of new tools in timely manner . Once design system will be in place it should lead to:
- Fast and easy design process.
- Faster development process.
- More consistent UI experience across whole platform.
- More intuitive Project management processes.
- Flexibility in UI changes for a Product at all
After design system was launched we noticed next changes:
- Design process became faster and easier to perform. Now designers can pull well defined UI components right into canvas and adapt them to users needs. Basically we would be able to eliminate Mid-Fi step from our design projects and jump to Hi-Fi stage without any losses. Designers can also do a quick colors change, resizing and any content changes on a spot without spending time on creation of new components every time.
- Development process was imposed as well since all design elements expected to be coded and connected to actual design components. Now developers can easily pull any type of visual components as a HTML/CSS snippet that is stored in our repository and related to this or that component.
- Overall visual experience of the product became even more consistent across whole platform. Having a single source of truth for all well defined UI elements help us to unify experiences in all upcoming and existing projects.
- Project management processes started to be more smooth and intuitive according to a feedback from our Product Owners. Have single source of truth for all design elements help them to create and communicate tasks for developers in more productive way since now everything has a names and its easier for PO to relate any design to pre-coded component.
- Flexibility in UI changes for a product was increased. In case of primary color scheme of product was changed, designer can overwrite it on atomic level and changes will be reflected in all components which uses this or that color.
