Fintraffic Design System
About Fintraffic
Fintraffic controls and manages traffic on the land, in the air and at sea. It provides traffic information that helps companies to create new traffic and smart mobility solutions for people and goods.
Intelligent traffic control and management services, up-to-date real-time traffic information and the competence of the company's 1,100 professionals improve the safety and smoothness of traffic and help reduce emissions. Fintraffic promotes sustainable traffic.
General information about the project
Fintraffic has a wide variety of public and internal digital services and software. Many of which are mission and safety critical traffic management tools that require formal training to use.
Working for Fintraffic as a consultant, it became apparent very quickly that both the public services and internal tools lacked a cohesive and unified UX between themselves.
I first pitched the idea of a company wide Design System for Fintraffic when I still worked as a consultant. Pitching the idea again after joining the ranks, I was happily surprised to find out the answer was a resounding yes. It supported Fintraffic's values and strategic goals perfectly.
The development process the Design System MVP included, but was not limited to:
- Procuring a team of designers to help make it happen
- Getting all of Fintraffic's different modes of transportation onboard (that was surprisingly easy)
- Inclusion of Fintraffic's development, product and service managers and many of our external designers and developers in the creation process in the form of workshops and surveys.
- Developing an airtight Design System Governance model
- Finding suitable pilot projects for the Design System MVP
- Developing a Figma library for the Design System
- Laying the ground work for the technical CSS framework and web component library
- Making all of this as public as possible to expose myself and the team to public scrutiny
Fintraffic Design System helps to unify the customer and user experience in all of Fintraffic's public and internal digital services and tools with a common design language, UI guidelines and a component library. Over time it will drastically improve time-to-market (or time-to-production) by speeding up the development process of new and existing services and tools while reducing the development costs.
Fintraffic Design System manifests itself publicly or semi-publicly in four different ways:
- a documentation site (design.fintraffic.fi)
- a Figma library
- a CSS framework (WIP, github.com/fintraffic-design)
- a web component library (WIP, github.com/fintraffic-design)
My contribution
I'm the father of Fintraffic Design System and currently work as its design lead and product owner.
I executed the procurement of the initial Design System team to help us with all the work involved in the process.
During the MVP development process I oversaw the team's work, solved creative issues, prioritized backlog, defined the MVP features and participated in the hands on design work.