Saleswhale Blog Just enough system: Rebuilding Saleswhale’s design system

How it all started When I first joined Saleswhale in late 2019, it was my first job as a UX designer. One of the earlier things I got to do was a sweeping UI audit of the platform, trying to catalog the elements (buttons, form fields, and so on) that were in use on the platform’s frontend. There’s no polite way to put this, but it was a mess – buttons would be one of four heights between 35.4 pixels and 38 pixels, there were three distinct modal patterns, and five styles of notifications just for errors.  Recognizing the issue We had a component library on Figma, but it was loosely managed with little governance and wasn’t kept up to date. At many times, it was easier to copy a component from a recent prototype because it just wasn’t available in the library. Our components were also kept in 24 separate Figma files – perhaps from a time where we weren’t quite thinking how the system could scale – which meant you had to toggle on multiple libraries whenever you created a new prototype that used components. Also, some of the components we had on Figma were clearly mismatched to the frontend.