Worked for
iCabbi
Year
2024- now
Timeline
Ongoing project
My Role
Design systems
Figma
Mobile App Design
Team
Derek Jones - Design Director
Challenge
The iCabbi App users generate 2.2 times more trips, every single year. This makes the user experience of the app a direct commercial lever, rather than just a nice to have feature.
Despite it's importance, the customer facing apps have piled UI debt. Over several years and multiple sprint cycles later the apps have accumulated interlocked problems that individually were manageble but collectively created a significant drag on the design & engineering velocity.
Design and development were out of sync, there was visual inconsistency in parts of the app, white label complexity, accessibility issues, impact on sprints, back and forth that delayed shipping. All these problems made the case for having a Design System.
"The absence of a single source of truth for design decisions is creating compounding inconsistency at every layer." - Product team
Design Solution
App was looking dated, the feedback from fleet operators was increasing day by day and the apps were being benchmarked increasingly against Uber and Bolt which were backed by mature, cohesive design systems.
Thus, a decision was made to invest in a full design system - rather than just a partial component library. The Engineering team were also migrating from a legacy system to a modern framework thus the timing of introducing a Design system was deliberate. So the frontend and the backend were simultaneously preparing for a architectural rewrite of the product.
Project Goals
Our Design System was scoped around four overarching goals:
Consistency - establish a single visual & interactive language cross all customer facing native mobile apps.
Parity - ensure that whatever is designed in Figma translates to the codebase with no ambiguity, reducing interpretation gap between design and engineering.
Scalability - Build a system that can accommodate new features, new fleets and platform updates easily without needing a redesign.
Efficiency - Reduce design time, reduce the effort of duplicating, re-creating and re-specifying components for every task. Focusing on solving UX issues rather than creating assets.
