Omnivise
Design System
At Siemens Energy, we want to create harmonious experiences for our users. We solve challenging interactions at the outset and then apply the solutions consistently across our product suite - making sure people only have to learn them once.
Our guidelines have space for flexibility and are continuously revised and expanded to suit changing product needs.
Working in software design & development, we are often required to ship one-off solutions. Sometimes we're working within time constraints and sometimes we just haven't yet agreed upon a path forward. These one-off solutions aren't inherently bad, but if they aren't built upon a solid foundation, we eventually find ourselves having to pay back accrued technical and design debts.
Visual language is like any other language. Misunderstandings arise if the language is not shared and understood by everyone using it. As a product or team grows, the challenges within these modalities compound.
A unified design system is essential to building better and faster; better because a cohesive experience is more easily understood by our users, and faster because it gives us a common language to work with.
My Role: UX Lead, Individual Contributor
Duration: January 2020 - June 2022
Platform: Web
Design Tool: Figma
Problem
The user experience of our product was inconsistent and varied in interface, quality, and experience across different applications and platforms. Different designers were working on UXD of different applications of the same suite, so there were inconsistencies in the visuals and experience
Challenges
-
The design must be intuitive and must be designed with a user-centered design approach.
-
Natural interactions, behaviors, and positions must be used for all the design components in the application
-
.The look and feel must be unified for all the Omniviseofferings. So, it’s easy for users to analyze any page or screen of the application.
-
End-users are affiliated with the existingOmnivise offerings, so the challenge was to have less deviation in the design to keep the learning curve as minimal as possible.
-
No vicinity to the users and remote working.
Journey
Siemens Energy was set to be carved out from the Siemens AG group in early 2020. The re-branding of Siemens Energy as an organization was initiated in collaboration with an external design agency. Hence there was a need for a new design system for Siemens Energy applications for a new cohesive experience.
I was leading a small team of 2 UX Designers for this project. We all were aiming for a unique user experience for Siemens Energy products which speaks the same language set by the marketing team for Siemens Energy as a brand.
We started with compiling page design concepts spanning products and platforms to normalize the visual language and component design decisions. The goal of referencing the design systems is not intended to be explorations of project-specific details, but a reference for designing a visual language and identifying core components across products. We referenced the Material design system and Bootstrap framework.
The Bootstrap framework was then finalized as a base for the OMNIVISE design system and it was further customized with the Siemens Energy brand guidelines.
Components & Patterns
We designed various UI elements like buttons, input fields, selections, tooltips, etc., and created reusable components out of those.
Patterns such as navigation, tables, notification, alerts, or modals were also made out of the components.
We published this Design Library in our organization’s Figma space so that it is available for all fellow designers to be used over and over throughout the product.
Conclusion
The first iteration of our design system was created in a couple of months by 2 designers juggling multiple projects at the same time. With that small foundation, we were able to create sweeping changes and introduce usability improvements to virtually every product area.
Being responsible for building a design system from scratch has shown me the depth of thinking involved in crafting each small piece, and how doing all this thinking upfront will reduce the barriers, and save the team so much time later down the road.
Of course, building a design system is not a project with a deadline. It is an ongoing process. It needs maintenance and improvement, at least as long as your product does. Looking forward!