Executive Summary
The aquaculture industry relies on data-heavy, multi-platform applications to manage operations efficiently. The challenge? The platform lacked a consistent UX/UI structure, making it difficult to scale new features while ensuring a seamless user experience.
To solve this, I led the development of a scalable UX design system, ensuring uniformity across applications, faster development cycles, and improved usability. By standardizing components, documentation, and workflows, we reduced development time, improved design consistency, and streamlined collaboration across teams.
The result?
✓ A unified UX across multiple services
✓ Development time reduced significantly
✓ A scalable system that supported rapid feature expansion
✓ Improved efficiency and cost savings, freeing up resources for AI research and innovation, which strengthened the company’s position for a successful funding round.
*Due to NDA compliance, the project name and client details are not disclosed. For all NDA-bound projects, only the domain or a project code name is referenced.
Introduction: Understanding the Need for a Scalable UX Approach
By mid-2022, the aquaculture platform was expanding rapidly, integrating multiple services under one system. However, as new features were introduced, the lack of a consistent design structure became a growing problem.
At the time, each service had its own UI components, interaction patterns, and visual inconsistencies, making it challenging for users to navigate the platform seamlessly. Additionally, developers were forced to custom-build UI elements for every new feature, leading to longer development cycles and unnecessary effort duplication.
Without a scalable UX design system, the platform risked becoming increasingly difficult to manage, slowing down innovation and frustrating users. It was clear that we needed a centralized, reusable system that could support rapid growth while ensuring a cohesive experience.
That’s when I set out to design and implement a UX design system that would solve these challenges at scale.
Problem Analysis: The Challenges of a Fragmented UX
The lack of a unified design system led to several key challenges:
1. Inconsistent UI Across the Platform
• Multiple teams were designing without a shared component library, resulting in visual mismatches and usability issues.
• Users had to relearn UI patterns when navigating between different services, reducing efficiency.
2. Slow Development Due to Repetitive Work
• Developers had to rebuild UI elements from scratch for each new feature, leading to wasted time and duplicated efforts.
• Without a standard framework, design-to-development handoffs were inconsistent, requiring constant revisions.
3. Difficulty Scaling New Features
• The lack of reusable components meant that every new feature required significant redesign and redevelopment.
• Teams struggled to maintain UX consistency across new product expansions, increasing technical debt.
The platform was growing, but its design and development process weren’t built for scalability. To fix this, we needed a design system that could unify, optimize, and accelerate UX implementation.
Solution & Methodology: How We Built the Design System
1. Establishing a Centralized Design Language
To ensure consistency, I worked closely with designers, developers, and product managers to define:
• A universal design language with shared typography, spacing, and color guidelines.
• Reusable UI components to standardize buttons, forms, tables, and interactive elements.
• A pattern library to establish best practices for common user flows.
By aligning on a single source of truth, we eliminated UI inconsistencies across applications.
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2. Building a Component-Based Design System
Instead of designing from scratch for every new feature, we created a scalable component library in Figma, which:
• Allowed designers to reuse and adapt components instead of rebuilding them.
• Ensured every component followed the same accessibility and usability standards.
• Reduced the number of custom-designed UI elements by 40%, leading to faster iteration cycles.
To support development, we documented detailed component specifications to ensure seamless handoffs between design and engineering teams.
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3. Integrating the Design System with Development
A design system is only effective if it works well with development. To streamline implementation, we:
• Built a component library in Storybook, allowing developers to quickly access and reuse elements.
• Integrated the system into the product development workflow, ensuring new features aligned with existing standards.
• Created an interactive documentation hub, where designers and developers could reference guidelines, accessibility requirements, and usage rules.
This drastically improved the design-to-development workflow, making collaboration smoother and reducing rework.
Results & Impact: Transforming UX at Scale
The design system had an immediate and measurable impact on efficiency, consistency, and scalability.
✦ Faster Feature Development – Developers reduced UI build time by 41%, allowing faster releases. *The results were measured over three sprints (approximately 30 working days), comparing pre-shift development to post-implementation after 80% of components were built.
✦ Stronger Design Consistency – UX/UI inconsistencies were eliminated, improving user experience across all services.
✦ Increased Team Efficiency – Designers and developers worked faster with reusable components, it also reduced QA effort, as the standardized design system minimized UI inconsistencies and rework.
✦ Cost Savings & Business Impact – Reduced custom UI development costs, enabling the company to focus more on AI research & product innovation.
Most importantly, the structured, scalable approach directly contributed to the platform’s success in securing a $48.4M funding round, proving that great design isn’t just about aesthetics, it’s about business impact.
Key Takeaways
Looking back, this project reinforced several key lessons about scaling design efficiently:
✓ A design system is more than just UI—it’s a foundation for product growth.
✓ Collaboration between designers and developers is critical to ensure adoption and success.
✓ Standardization doesn’t limit creativity—it amplifies it by reducing redundant work.
For teams struggling with scaling UX across complex products, investing in a strong design system is one of the most impactful ways to improve efficiency, product quality, and business outcomes.
If you’ve worked on scaling a design system, I’d love to hear about your experience. Let’s connect and exchange insights!
