ShopBack
Design System
Overview
Making ShopBack design system easier to use, maintain, and adopt.
My role
Built and governed components, icons, and motion; documented guidance; supported teams; and advocated for adoption.
Team
Me
PD
PD
PD
EM
AE
AE
AE
IE
IE
IE
CW
Impact overview
80% of live experiences built with shared components
Reduced repeated work while making future updates and implementation more consistent.
Clearer guidance, faster answers
Created documentation and consolidated it into a single source of truth, cutting time spent finding answers by ~15 seconds on average.
Problem
The system had no dedicated owner
The original system depended on one contract designer. So when he left, no one really understood nor adopted what remained, making it difficult to demonstrate its value.
Approach
Re-establishing ShopBack's design system
The team re-established the design system by defining clearer ownership and ways of working, then focused on implementing core design tokens and building the reusable foundations and components teams needed most.
How it worked
Owned by the core team, shaped by the wider design community
The system spans five kits: Foundations, Components, Icons, Illustration and Motion. As part of Design Studio, I co-owned Components and led the Icon and Motion kits, serving as the go-to person for their maintenance, guidance and evolution. Feature designers participated as advocates and rotating contributors, bringing real use cases and feedback into the system while helping drive adoption across their teams.
Redesigning and implementing components
Building an icon system with clear rules and workflows
Making the design system part of feature roadmaps
Restructuring scattered guidance into a single source of truth
What comes next
Getting the system running → helping it mature
2023 — Establish and adopt
The goal was to get the libraries running: building scalable components to reduce design effort and ensure consistency, then driving adoption so feature teams actually used them. This resulted in 80% of live experiences being built with shared components.
2024 — Mature and evolve
The focus shifted to improving what already existed: tackling more complex components and responding to new use cases to see how the system could evolve to support changing needs, while restructuring documentation to reduce maintenance.
Takeaway
What building this system taught me
Success looks like continued evolution
The strongest measure of success was not adoption alone, but a system that kept evolving — one teams could continue using and improving well after its original owners had moved on.
Give teams structure, not restrictions
Consistency does not mean standardising everything. A good system gives teams enough structure to move faster while leaving room for different problems and use cases.
Think beyond the component
Designing across feature teams taught me to consider downstream workflows, edge cases and where a reusable component should end — and a more specific template should begin.
Tools will change. Principles will not.
AI may make design-system workflows faster and reshape how the work gets done. But the principle remains: a system succeeds when its knowledge outlives its owners.
