Building a Scalable Design System

Company: Axon — US-based enterprise logistics tech
Domain: B2B warehouse management (Ops, Analytics, Control Tower, WES, RAPTOR)

To tackle design inconsistencies and slow handoffs across Axon’s warehouse products, my teammate and I built a scalable design system from scratch. It brought visual consistency, faster development, and improved usability—turning weeks of rework into days. This system became the foundation for shipping high-quality, modular solutions at scale.

The Problem – Why We Needed a Design System

Before implementing a design system, our product suffered from UI inconsistencies, totally different color system in dark/light modes, accessibility issues, and inefficiencies (1) in design and development. The absence of standardized components led to:
  • Developers recreating similar components multiple times.
  • Frequent back-and-forth between designers and developers to clarify colors and component states.
  • Increased debugging efforts due to inconsistent implementation.
We performed a heuristic analysis that highlighted these inconsistencies and shared our findings with stakeholders. This analysis, combined with before-and-after visual comparisons, demonstrated the need for a unified design system.

Convincing Stakeholders – Business Impact

Initially, stakeholders were hesitant to invest in a design system because there was no drastic visual change. To shift the conversation, we focused on efficiency gains and measurable impact:
  • Upfront Component Creation – Developers now build reusable components first, rather than designing screens individually, streamlining the development process.
  • Standardized Colors – Eliminated the need to manually check and reassign colors for each screen.
  • Time Savings – Screen development time was reduced by 50%, and when factoring in the effort to create reusable components, we estimated an overall 20% reduction in development time by minimizing context switching.
  • Simplified Debugging – Components and colors can now be edited from a single source, reducing errors and rework.
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