FIS one foundational design system
for FIS
A scalable & modular design system and documentation for a financial services provider.
Project: FIS is an international provider of financial services technology and outsourcing services for small and medium sized banks. For this initial phase of work we worked on the foundational design system, which over multiple projects would help create a holistic system of products and a unified design approach for the whole FIS software offerings. This was the first stab at setting up an interaction design and visual design system.
Process: We started with a four week research phase conducting interviews around the US at regional small-medium banks, front and back offices. In collaboration with a design researcher, I led interviews and synthesized findings into insights that formed the basis of our product vision. We then ran design sprints against prioritized user stories. We also conducted remote user evaluation sessions with the same set of users to make sure the product work was grounded in user needs and solved pain points.
My role and responsibilities: I was the principle designer on this 3 month project. With help from an oversight CD and a design technologist partner, I ran a 6 person sprint team of designers and technologists. I also took on product management responsibilities, auditing existing systems, creating and managing the initial backlog. I helped run workshops with 30 stakeholders to review and prioritize user stories for design sprints. I also ran the user testing sessions in between design sprints, synthesized learnings and helped the team make continuous enhancements.
user research
product strategy
product managemnet
design systems
design team lead
client lead
Project Highlights
1. User research for product discovery
In collaboration with a design researcher, we ran user interviews for different types of bank employees, observing their context and work flows. As most of the design team could not participate in the research process, I continuosly extracted tangible insights and observations to share with the team to give everyone the full context of user needs and pain points. Our biggest challenge was designing for the variety of contexts, job responsibilities and work flows. Users were highly distracted, had often disrupted work flows where they multi tasked using a dozen different FIS and other software. Our FIS ONE vision was to start laying the ground work to unify the disparate software experience and interface.
2. Kick-starting a design system
I started by documenting the ecosystem of users and applications. This diagram with “Universe” of users and FIS & 3rd party applications around them helped us get the big picture and start architecting the system against real world context.
Part of design system foundation, I started defining the interaction model through layers, work spaces and main ways to navigate between parts of the “Universe".