Pacific Life Design System
Creating an enterprise design system from the ground up.
THE CHALLENGE
For years, Pacific Life’s decentralized model has resulted in a disconnected customer experience.
As the senior design lead for the new design system workstream, I took the initiative to develop a new team solely dedicated to uniting a broken visual system.
How might we align a divided enterprise model through a design system to deliver consistent customer experiences?
THE PROCESS
We performed an in-depth design audit of all customer-facing platforms, both marketing and product-related.
My role and responsibilities:
Senior UX Team Lead
Project Roadmap
UX Design Research
Team structure + cadence
Instead of tackling everything at once, we tested our approach starting with a fundamental core of any design system: color.
We collected all known documentation across the enterprise relating to color. We found that the majority of documentation lived in stagnant .pdf style guides; so when changes were proposed or even implemented, the documentation itself was disjointed and incohesive.
Keeping stakeholder concerns in mind, our new approach leveraged the assets we already had.
Based on an approved brand asset (the Pacific Life logo), we generated a fully accessible range of color variants for product design.
With a solid foundation and design rationale in place, we were able to begin researching and developing consistent components.
Leveraging in-flight projects across the enterprise, I led our team through a series of workshops to formalize our design system process and structure.
Snapshot of in-progress component development
Want to learn more about this project?
Contact me at lucy@darbydesignco.com to schedule a conversation.