The average organisation wastes up to 42% of their development time on resolving technical and design debt.

Problem statement

How might we save time and money by standardising decisions that can be replicated at scale?

Designers were constantly frustrated with repeatedly solving the same problems. Developers were exhausted with having to custom style each component and grappling with a chaotic codebase. Producers were forever perplexed by the lawlessness of the content model builds in the CMS. Testers were fed up with no single source of truth for QA.

Post-its detailing team pain points, segmented into four sections Says, Does, Thinks and Feels.

We were suffering with:

A spaghetti network of duplicated design and development efforts
A federated contribution model with no governance
Low code parity to design intention
No FED Chapter governance
No scalable strategy in place
Bottlenecks and repetition between UX and UI
Delivering inconsistent customer experiences

So, in July 2019, we began our design system journey.

The idea

Build a pattern library with guidelines, processes, rituals and a shared language that supports Belong product teams to rapidly deliver consistent, accessible digital products.

Our mission

🤝 Use each other’s work so you can ship shit fast.

The scalable impact

So, what will it do?

To bring order to chaos.
To amplify the value of design.
Build quality work with minimal friction.

The commercial value

Designers, developers, producers and testers were having to waste a lot of time clarifying details, duplicating build efforts and making mundane decisions. By automating a lot of this, they could be freed up to innovate and problem solve the chunkier customer problems.