After working on features for the Celestial app for a few months, I moved to the newly created Celestial Design System pod.

Due to my tenure on the Celestial project, I had witnessed a lot of features being designed across pods and I started to notice how pods weren't in sync with each other despite their attempts to use Comcast’s Xfinity Design System (XDS). As our pods started ramping up production work, we realized that XDS did not support the complexities of an enterprise system like ours, nor did it live up to our standards of accessibility.

The Celestial Design System (CDS) pod was created in direct response for a more active team evaluating patterns, components, and processes across Celestial. Our pod was made up of a core team (myself, a design lead, another designer, and a UX engineer), but we also work closely with a few other pod members and some of our contacts on the XDS team.

I worked on the Celestial Design System team from February 2023 to February 2024.

Established clear channels of communications and ways of working for Celestial pods; documented process goals, file setup recommendations, and presentation expectations.

Conducted internal DesignOps research to understand how folks are navigating design-to-dev handoff and how we can improve the process.

Built stronger relationships with parent design system (XDS) and their code counterparts (Prism); better understood their road map and how we could tailor our proposals to align with their goals. This strong partnership has enabled us to get more "yes, we can add that" or "yes, we can make that adjustment" answers from those teams.

Built product-level library with over 20 new components specific to Celestial; for components from the parent design system, we've provided detailed pattern documentation. Adoption rate for our system is currently around 72% and in some cases, we've seen a reduction in dev time in up to 24%.

Audited over 60+ components from both a Figma perspective and a code perspective to ensure alignment; compiling a readout deck to help pods understand what changes needed to be made before the MVP launch; classifying all impacts by severity and effort levels.

Released quarterly readouts that communicate releases and in-progress work.

UI/UX Design, App Design, Design Systems, WCAG Compliance

View the full case study on my website: https://www.nicolekutos.com/work/celestial-design-system