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Project context

Crowdhouse is a Fintech/Property investment platform. It allows customers to invest in property through solo or co-ownership. As a real estate ecosystem, it offers a variety of products and services. Therefore, a Design System is crucial to provide guidelines, tools, and processes.

I joined Crowdhouse in 2018 to operationalize UX, a key element of the company's strategic goal to build an ambitious digital real-estate ecosystem.

From the outset, I decided to incorporate and document our rapidly developing design resources into a Design System. This included guidelines, materials, and processes.

Crowdhouse Background circa May, 2018

• Operating ~2 years with original single business model and core team
• Starting with 3 products, 2 designers, 2 product owners, 2-3 developers
• Executive goal to assemble 3-4 autonomous product teams within 6 months
• Inconsistent product experiences
• Collaboration challenges between marketing/sales teams and newly introduced product group

A Proposal to Operationalize UX

At the onset of my journey with Crowdhouse, I crafted a proposal presentation. This outlined our proposed strategy for operationalizing UX Design, which included:

• Defining a UX maturity scale
• Conducting cross-organizational interviews
• Establishing foundational design principles
• Enhancing cross-organizational interaction with design
• Boosting organizational customer exposure
• Documenting a Design System

I led the design and development of the Crowdhouse Design System. This ranged from the initial conception to the final delivery, which involved hands-on design and facilitation throughout the process. Essentially, this design system served as documentation for developing a team and establishing a UX design practice within a burgeoning digital startup.

Design systems are much more than just a UI pattern library or components… as described by Jeremy Keith, it is a framework of how and why you use those patterns together, and the processes used to design and create within your specific context. —Jeremy Keith - Design Systems

Getting On The Same Page

To ensure our team and stakeholders understood the scope and scale of the proposed design system, I used this diagram to indicate the processes, tools, artefacts, and workflows that would be drawn into a systematic representation of how we design anything at Crowdhouse, across product, brand, and marketing.

Turning challenges into opportunities

Even though we had agreed to create a design system, we faced some clear challenges in proceeding, related to change management for a small but successful startup preparing for growth. Rather than postponing progress, I framed these challenges as opportunities.

Challenges

1. No dedicated project resources.
2. No existing design or product documentation.
3. Onboarding team contributors while project in progress.
4. Undefined multi-product brand architecture.

Opportunities

1. Use project as a collaborative, team-building effort for new UX team.
2. Documentation generated as team began defining processes and artefacts
3. New contributors ensured we had fresh eyes to validate as we created our system.
4. Parallel Brand Architecture project.

Building a Design System via Contributing Workstreams

Several internal projects and initiatives contributed to Domus. These included defining design principles, creating a UI pattern/component library, revising the brand architecture, and establishing writing/voice and tone guidelines. It was vital to ensure these projects provided their own business value, in addition to forming the content of our design system. This approach was key to continual progress towards our goal.

<aside> ➕ Design Principles

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<aside> ➕ UI Pattern library

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<aside> ➕ Brand architecture

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<aside> ➕ Product glossary

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<aside> ➕ Voice & Tone

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<aside> ➕ Better collaboration

</aside>

<aside> ✅ Crowdhouse Design System

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