Modern XL Design System

Pearson serves over 160 million users across the globe, and the products were overdue for a refresh. The goal is simple but the execution is much more complex. My role was to create, maintain and scale a new design system and design tokens.

Product launch Fall 2024

Role:

Timeline:

Senior Visual Designer

Constraints:

Cost and Time

Scenario:

One of the major challenges Pearson was facing was that a lot of the pages, products, features, and components were not in sync with each other in terms of UI/UX. This happened because they were designed at different times, by different designers with different business goals.

Over time, the product became more disjointed because a lack of a design system and underlying design principles. The user experience also suffered because of the lack of consistency.

New Business Goals

Drive consistency
Modern look and feel
Introduce design tokens
Simplify navigation

Team and roles:

My role was the Senior Visual Designer on the Higher Ed UX Design team. The team consisted of a Senior Design Director, Design Manager, Senior and Junior Product Designers, and a UX Prototyper.

My Roles and Responsibilities

Overall look and feel of the product
Creation, maintenance and scaling of the Design System.
Creation, communication and implementation of the novel Design Tokens.
Partnered with A11Y team to assure components met requirements.

Build a coherent, hierarchical and thoughtful design system.

My role was to make all visual design choices around color, typography, icons, accessibility and brand.

Iterations:

Design goals:

Design tokens allows us to iterate on colors, type and elevation as we scaled.

Impact & Learnings:

During user testing, students have asked to use the product now.

Specifically the capability to switch light and dark mode.

Design choices, Iterations, and Implementations:

To begin, I started designing the basic atoms of the design system like fonts, primary colors, icon sets. Knowing this could evolve it was important to set up the design token framework early. I partnered closely with our UX Prototyper on reference and system color tokens and font styles.

To begin, I started designing the basic atoms of the design system like fonts, primary colors, icon sets. Knowing this could evolve it was important to set up the design token framework early. I partnered closely with our UX Prototyper on reference and system color tokens and font styles.