Desjardins : breaking internal silos through global interactive patterns.
Desjardins approached me with the mandate of installing a design governance throughout the cooperative. Being one of the largest credit unions in North America, Desjardins had trouble giving its members the impression that the company was working as a whole.
Internal silos were beginning to be deconstructed towards a more centralized approach, and the design patterns online and on their digital and physical platforms needed to be reconciled into one global offering.
Humanize finance
Cold interfaces representing hard financial facts and tools were hard to understand and difficult to use. Through a process of empathizing, prototyping and testing, we created a series of design patterns that were meant to be easy to understand, adapted to each member’s reality, and aimed at reassuring the users that their hard spent money was in good hands, no matter the platform they were using.
Design leadership
Hiring a design leadership team is no small task. Corporate realities can make it hard for a new team to join and change things around. By creating a centralized, but open, DesignOps team, we made it possible for a dedicated group of people to coach and mentor designers into working collaboratively towards a common goal. The creation of the design system and a series of shared interactive patterns was key to solidify our credibility.
From lo-fi prototyping to hi-fi testing
Creating an interactive system that portrays both high-density information patterns and flexible product needs was made possible through low-fidelity prototyping. This way of working enables the detection of various needed patterns throughout different user flows and allowed the team to identify transversal interaction patterns that needed to be standardized and normalized for re-use.
High fidelity prototypes were then created and tested with real members of the cooperative to gauge the emotional response through the Cube HX sandbox method, primarily used for advertising. This way of testing the emotional response gave us a good idea of what patterns worked and what approach of content visualisation was preferred by our members.
Continuity between content and product
As the design library began to grow from the content side of things, there were concerns as to how the new design direction would influence product teams. It was easy to put in place a palette of colours, type scales and a general art direction. However, transposing these standards into product design workflows had to be done by opening the system to patterns that were much more intricate.
Starting by onboarding new features and redesign projects, we were able to identify flaws within our design library and work directly with product teams to find solutions and string many user flows together to form cohesive interaction patterns that became keystones for future developments.
iOS Login Screen sub-flow
iOS Credit Card sub-flow
Documenting design
One thing that is often not talked about when creating design systems is the arduous task of documenting design principles, decisions and the outright vision that leads to why certain patterns, colours or measurements are what they are.
Considering the size of Desjardins, with over 45 000 employees, documentation was crucial in having a strong buy-in from over 4 000 employees working in digital solutions.
Contextual examples, data-supported claims and explanations and WCAG 2.1-verified elements are good ways to get people onboard with the system. Openness around discussions, presence in product teams and a strong mindset based on influencing product decisions at their core and allowing designers to create, iterate and improve components of the system will insure its existence and usage in the long run.
Timeline
July 2017 and ongoing.
Role
Lead Advisor, DesignOps and Design Systems at Desjardins
Team
Florent Cazé, Jacinthe Nourry, Marjorie Lazaro, Jean-Denis Richard, Maxime Girard, Johanna Basto, Anjali Bousquet, Florian Petit, and many others.