Many design systems focus solely on the digital aspect of a brand’s reach, but this team was concerned with the customer experience more broadly. Fisher Scientific as a brand needed a single design system that reflected the depth and breadth of knowledge that was currently being held by individuals and localized on desktops scattered across various teams. The design system would have both an external and internal audience and would need to cover everything from product video guidelines to external supplier templates to a UI kit.
The problem
Fisher Scientific is made up of many teams overseeing many different parts of the website and the sales funnel in general. It’s easy for teams to be siloed within their specific function, and not all teams communicate regularly which leads to inconsistencies in customer-facing materials and a less than ideal brand image. Different “hubs” of information with varying degrees of accuracy floated around, but there was a need for a single source of truth for brand guidelines to keep everyone in sync and to reduce rework and inconsistencies.
The solution
To create this single source of truth, we embarked on a lengthy and tedious process that involved many different aspects of the brand. We started by gathering all of the bits and pieces of guidelines that had been created previously and were being used by various teams and groups. Then came the audit of those materials to see where information overlapped or differed and identified where there were gaps. Working from a master list of all of the material we hoped to include in the final product, we began working through the creation of new guidelines in priority order and a new structure for the documentation site. Concurrently, we spoke to members of various teams that would be using the guidelines to learn what information would be helpful to include and how they anticipated getting that information out of the final product. Design systems should be flexible and therefore are never really “complete”, but we rolled out the new site with many informational sessions to make sure everyone would be comfortable finding and using the design system.
