Streamlining design and development with a unified design system
Company
Rezdy
Year
2022 – Present
Industry
Tourism
Rezdy is a platform used by tour and activity operators to manage bookings, inventory, and distribution online. It handles reservations, updates availability in real-time, manages customers, processes payments, and connects with other booking platforms.
I joined during a pivotal phase of platform modernization, taking ownership over building our design system (DS). Adopting a centralized model, I collaborated with two frontend engineers to establish and maintain the system.
Upon joining the company, the platform still retained the majority of its legacy UI elements from when the company started in 2011.
Despite the presence of designers who came and went before my tenure, there was no established design language or UI kit for the team to work from.
Consequently, designers resorted to rebuilding the same components in their project files which resulted in a lot of time wasted and inconsistent designs across teams.
Furthermore, aside from the two engineers mentioned earlier, the rest of the engineering team specialized in backend development. Due to a lack of frontend domain knowledge, many features were cobbled together using various frontend frameworks, leading to bloated code, numerous bugs, and an unsatisfactory user experience overall.
Our objective was straightforward: to develop a system that would enhance our efficiency. It needed to be easily understood, maintainable, and scalable—above all, simple to adopt.