Creating a Design System for a Fortune 500 manufacturer.
Stanley Black & Decker is an American manufacturer of industrial tools and household hardware. Their portfolio of sites spans the globe and includes brands such as Black & Decker, DeWalt, Craftsman, Irwin, and Stanley. They wanted to create a Design System to streamline brand implementation and reduce time to market. The first phase of the project was to deliver a proof of concept that we could put in front of all major stakeholders. I worked alongside my Production Team to help bring this vision to life.
Project overview / Workshop facilitation / Leadership and mentoring / Stakeholder management / UI Audit and consultation
Discovery.
Stanley Black & Decker approached us with the concept of a white-label design system that their UX team had developed in-house. These only existed as Figma files, however, and our task was to translate these into a fully functional component-based design system.
During discovery, my team and I ran numerous workshops with their UX designers, Business Analysts and Product Owners in the US. We needed to understand what they had created, in order to advise on how this could be implemented as working CMS components. We clearly mapped out all the options available to users and highlighted where there might be potential usability, scalability, and accessibility issues.
This provided my team with a solid foundation to design, document and build the system.
Design, build and test.
After the discovery phase, I stepped into guidance and oversight of the project from a design and production perspective. I worked alongside my Solution Designers and offshore Production Team to ensure the project stayed on track and offer guidance where required. Once the design and documentation was complete, we built out the components as specified and used these to build a DeWalt site as a proof of concept. This enabled us to roadtest the system and iterate where necessary, and it also allowed the UX team to get buy-in from the wider set of stakeholders.
Rollout.
After the successful launch of the DeWalt MVP, we were ready to rollout several more brands. We had daily conversations with the Stanley Black and Decker delivery team and senior stakeholders to ensure that key milestones were successfully met and to demonstrate our progress.
The team continued to work alongside the Stanley Black & Decker UX team to work through the feature requests in a Jira backlog alongside making improvements to the existing system.
We also trained key members of their team in the usage of the system, allowing them to start migrating sites.