A design system built to scale Warwick Business School's digital estate
Warwick Business School (WBS) is part of the University of Warwick and is ranked in the top 10 in the UK league table. From its campuses in Coventry and at The Shard in London, WBS offers undergraduate, postgraduate, MBA, executive and doctoral programmes to students from around the world.
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A new global design system (GDS)
We collaborated with WBS's developers on the design system throughout, to ensure it could be easily integrated and adopted. We defined the foundations (typography, grid, spacing and a colour system that gives each study area, from undergraduate to MBA, executive education and doctoral, its own identity) and a library of reusable components in Figma such as the programme finder and programme cards to ranking panels and photo tiles. We set clear naming conventions and usage rules to give designers and developers a shared system, with every component documented in Storybook as a single source of truth.
Agile sprints, rapid rollout
We worked in design sprints alongside the WBS digital team, starting with mobile and using wireframes and clickable prototypes to map and test key journeys early, such as finding and comparing a programme. Each template then moved through UI design, front-end build and QA with regular presentations keeping stakeholders close to the work and upto date.
Built to be governed, not just launched
Our team created the front-end code which was built to slot straight into the WBS CMS, which their internal team integrated. Clear component specs, semantic markup and rigorous QA across browsers, devices and accessibility standards meant integration ran smoothly. Regular design to developer check-in throughout meant any issues were resolve at pace.
Results
Components created
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Efficiency created
design and development time cut by
Speed
faster time-to-market
