ThermoFisher Scientific

A unified design system

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Design System

My Role

UX/UI Designer

Timeline

20 months

Project Type

Documentation

Platform

Figma, ZeroHeight

Thermo Fisher Scientific is a Fortune 500 company and a global leader in the life sciences. Its mission is to enable customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer.

Problem Statement

Our UX team had created a new design system to represent the brand's modern approach, but it lacked usage guidelines, accessibility standards, and interaction patterns. This led to inconsistent component implementations across products, creating fragmented experiences. Users had to relearn interfaces with each new tool instead of focusing on their work of making the world healthier, cleaner, and safer.

Overview

To create effective documentation for our design system, I took a three-step approach to ensure the guidelines would meet current needs and follow industry standards.

Understanding User Needs: I conducted research to identify how our end users interact with our products and what consistency means for their workflows. Understanding their mental models and pain points was crucial to documenting components that would create intuitive experiences.
Collaborating with the Design Team: I talked with designers in our team to understand their current implementation practices, document common questions and confusion points, and identify gaps in their component knowledge. These conversations revealed where documentation was most critically needed, defining delivery prioritization.
Researching Industry Best Practices: I studied design systems from leading UX companies, including Material Design, IBM Carbon, and Shopify Polaris, to understand how they structure documentation, define usage guidelines, establish accessibility standards, and document interaction patterns. This research informed our documentation framework.

Impact

The design system documentation has become an essential resource for our design team, with measurable improvements in efficiency and consistency.

Improved Designer Confidence: Team feedback highlights that the documentation is detailed and effective, helping designers better understand when and how to use each component.

Reduced Implementation Time: With comprehensive documentation in place, designers spend less time making component decisions and more time solving user problems.

Streamlined Onboarding: New designers joining the team can now get up to speed more quickly, using the documentation to understand our design patterns, accessibility requirements, and implementation standards without needing constant guidance from senior team members.

Ongoing Evolution: This documentation is a living system that continues to evolve. As new components are added and existing ones are refined, I maintain and expand the guidelines to ensure they remain relevant, comprehensive, and aligned with both user needs and industry best practices

Note: Due to confidentiality, only specific information has been provided. I am happy to go over my approach and process upon request.