Pienso Reskin
A comprehensive platform reskin that’s more than skin-deep
- UX
- design systems
- leadership
A look at Pienso Explore in our new visual system.
Pienso had grown into a sprawling platform without establishing a formal design system. We needed one, and to clean up a lot of UX debt along the way.
Team
Design Will Crum (UX lead), Ennio Dybelli (UI lead), Sonia Wu (UX)
Development Brian Cort
Background
We'd never had a formal design system. UX baggage had piled up, the app looked dated, and UI dev work was slow.
Objective
Develop a custom design system to standardize our UX, refresh our UI, and future-proof our brief-to-build process
Process
- UX audit – We reviewed every page and listed every pain point.
- Scope triage – We sorted our recommendations into four tiers of complexity. Tier 4 was off limits.
- Divide & design – Ennio built the component library, and Sonia and I tested it while redesigning pages. Constant reviews kept us in sync.
Challenges
- Platform sprawl – We had 20+ pages and 7 principal features to redesign, with more on the way.
- UX baggage – Interaction and hierarchy inconsistencies had cropped up over the years.
- Open-ended scope – Anything short of back-end refactoring was on the table. Where do we draw the line?
Background
- Total app redesign – Comprehensive mock-ups of the entire platform, UX-refined and UI-refreshed
- From brief to dev, standardized – We'd built our own UI library, with guidelines. And a component library in Storybook for faster dev work.