In December 2018 I started as a consultant at The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, SMHI, to help them with UI and UX design. Shortly after I started working, I was made aware there was a lack of structure and no established way-of-working in terms of design. There were also very few designers working at the institute and a lot of the digital products were made by developers with no designer involved in the process. 

I wanted to help the client establish a coherent design process and better teamwork between designers and developers. After conducting interviews with developers, designers and product owners I realized there was a lot of guesswork, frustration and a lack of communication involved when developing new products. I presented the idea of creating a design system for my team to speed up processes and get a better structure of components. 

The project started in a small scale with me and a developer collaborating to create a component library of the most used components, designed using Sketch. But as the library grew and we also made more components into React components, other teams and people got interested in the idea of having a full-scale design system. 

I spent the following two years working together with my developer colleague, expanding the design system with more components and building a web portal with documentation of design and code principles. In the process we re-designed all the components to a more modern look and to be more accessible and compliant with WCAG 2.1. I also designed more than 100 icons and established a color scheme and a typescale, that were better adapted to digital design. 

We gave the design system the name SMHI Aurora and built a community around it with a chat channel where employees could ask questions, report bugs and give input on our work. We also gave our colleagues the opportunity to add feature requests and bug reports to our backlog in GitLab. On several occasions we organized workshops to involve more teams in our new way-of-working.  

When I left SMHI on paternity leave in July 2020, most of the teams built their products using SMHI Aurora. We collected feedback that people enjoyed working with the new design system since it sped up developing time and helped them create better products, that looked modern and that were more accessible for users. 

TLDR
I created a design system for SMHI that gave the organization a more modern look on digital products and that were also accessible and compliant with WCAG 2.1. The new design system was called SMHI Aurora and improved product quality, collaboration and sped up development throughout the organization.