The team:
Nick Schiefer – Design systems
Eric Kaschel – Design ops
Helped lead the effort in transitioning the Aetna design team to Figma
Objectives
- Complete app audit
- Develop and document of comprehensive asset libraries.
- Develop release procedures for updating the library.
- Create of courseware and tutorials.
- Evangelize Figma best practices to product, design, and development.
- Work with development to streamline the handoff process.
Solutions
This initiative led to a standardized approach for utilizing Figma as the primary design tool throughout the entire Aetna/CVS organization.
We established styles and variables that would be used as standardized design attributes. Allowing us to:
- Establish consistent app tokens
- Centralize the management of styles and variables
- Quickly integrate additional modes like “dark mode”.
- Give designers standardized design attributes.
- Reduce random design mistakes that end up in developed code.
We used the Brad Frost’s methodology to:
- Organize the library.
- Allow the designers to access the components efficiently by establishing a logical taxonomy.
- Provide documentation in context of the Figma environment by leveraging Figma’s contextual documentation features.
- Provide developers with a consistent product that maps to existing tokens and widgets.
Results
The outcome of this effort ended up accomplishing the following for Aetna:
- Designers were more efficient and consistent.
- UX designers were able to produce at a higher quality level.
- It significantly reduced a lot of the ambiguity in the designs making the developers more efficient.
- Reduced the complexity of the codebase, making for more stable applications.
- Development handoffs were a lot more efficient because the elements in the design had been developed before.