Overview

Forgerock had a very small product design team for several years. As they moved closer to acquisition there was a need to make a clear, scalable design system. There were several inconsistencies to be addressed between engineering and design tokens including naming conventions, structure, and overall inefficient multi-patterns.

My Role: Design Lead

Contributions: Design system audit, Figma based design system

Problem

How can we create a simple design system built based on bootstrap that we can build upon with additional features and continue to iterate on.

The Audit

Key Findings

• Weak Accessibility
  The system was not built with accessibility in mind. There were over 300 impacted items not meeting WCAG AA guidelines. This appeared in not just color contrast and interactions but also in some of our ARIA tags. We worked on a long-term plan to update these patterns across the product through the next 4 quarters.

• Not branded
  The design of the product feature colors not included in our brand.

• Inconsistent controls and interactions
  Since the product has been piecemeal, created by several engineers often without design oversight, there are several components with odd usability. Some of these were quick fixes that we were able to tackle in the first design round. For those that required research, we started a backlog in Jira to address in the coming quarters.