- Design System
- Leadership
- Strategy
- Accessibility
Orion: Design System
From outdated Figma sticker sheets to a company-wide system with 25 WCAG-compliant components. Built over three years of cross-functional collaboration and a healthy dose of perseverance.
- Role
- Product Designer
- Company
- Universe
- Duration
- April 2022 – June 2025
- Status
- Shipped (Continuous Improvements)
What Was Broken
When I joined Universe in April 2022, the design practice was fragmented::
- Figma components didn't reflect the live product
- Design assets lived in sticker sheets, expansive but undetailed
- Lack of component usage guidelines to govern designs and implementation
- Components and mock-ups lacked structure, barring speedy iteration
At its very core, the underlying issue was a lack of coordination around establishing shared standards. Without them, decisions are made in isolation which lead to inconsistent outcomes.
My Contributions
Cultivated a systems design culture
Set up weekly design system sessions to develop collective design thinking through a repeatable process: Select → Audit → Refine → Iterate → Adopt.
Advocated for code-aligned assets
Pushed for Figma auto-layout adoption as a baseline, moving the team from static assets to responsive, iteration-ready mock-ups
Designed and documented components
Led the team in writing usage documentation for our components to produce a unified source of truth to govern design decisions and engineering implementation.
PM'd the build
Partnered with the engineering lead to co-manage the build-out of Orion. My roles encompassed scope definition, identifying priorities, handing off design to developers, and communicating progress to stakeholders.
Owned QA
Reviewed every component for functional, visual, and accessibility compliance. Used axe DevTools for WCAG auditing and participated in code review to close the gap between design intent and build output.
Organised Storybook documentation
Structured and maintained the Storybook library as the source of truth for product teams building with Orion.
How It Came Together
Three years of persevering through neglect and deprioritization, condensed into a few sentences:
Experienced the problems first hand as a new joiner, audited existing design and component usage documentation, standardised Figma practices around front-end replication, and fostered a systems mindset across the design team.
Kickstarted a recurring, weekly design system session to keep the conversation going. Developed a repeatable, four-step process to derive alignment: Identify → Audit → Refine → Iterate.
The rebuild of Checkout (see case study: Checkout Improvements) accelerated Orions foundational work, and gave rise to Orion's first release, which was half-baked and messy, but nonetheless meaningful. The closing of the Checkout rebuild led to the formation of the Orion Guild, a cross-discipline group of front-end systems enthusiasts uniting to keep the flame alive.
Momentum stalled due to competing priorities and limited resources. I led the design team to use this interim period to refine scope, revisit priorities, and make the case for dedicated capacity.
As part of a company-wide system hardening initiative, Orion was selected as a candidate to receive dedicated resources for Q1. Along with an engineering lead, we capitalized on a series of sprints to push progress on Orion. 1 upgraded repo, 21 components, and 48 variants shipped in the final push. The result of these efforts was presented company-wide in May, with gradual rollout and adoption of Orion where viable.
By the beginning of 2026, 5 out of 8 project teams had started using Orion components where viable. Repo upgrades barring the adoption of Orion remain outstanding, preventing its full-on adoption. Orion is now in a stable, maintenance phase as our team works on determining its future as we adopt AI into our product workflow.
A Note on Design Systems
Design systems should reflect a company’s shared convictions around how good experiences should look, feel, and behave. If designers and engineers don’t see their thinking and principles reflected in the system, they'll experience dissonance, giving rise to neglect and indifference.
This belief shaped how I ran Orion. Every session was inclusive and every component decision was negotiated and reasoned, not just said and done. Engineers’ input was treated with utmost respect because they were right more often than not about how components actually behaved in code.
Reflection
Three years is a long time to dedicate myself towards something that at times, felt like it could lose steam at any moment. Working on Orion taught me that systems work is relationship work. The 25 components matter less than the collective buy-in that produced them.
The result that I'm most proud of is that 5 of 8 product teams actively choose to build with Orion. Adoption is the only measure that actually matters since a design system that never affects the surfaces touched by our end-users is merely a daydream, not a tool that practically influences reality.