Design system · 2023
Halo Design System
One design system for every Parcelwise product.
Halo brings Parcelwise's courier app, tracking pages and warehouse tools onto one set of tokens, components and guidelines, used every day by more than 200 designers and engineers.
- Client
- Parcelwise
- Role
- Design systems lead
- Timeline
- 9 months
- Year
- 2023
Results
- designers and engineers use Halo every day
- 200+
- faster to design and ship a new screen
- 2x
- of core components meet WCAG 2.2 AA
- 100%
Parcelwise moves millions of parcels a month across Europe. Over five years it had built a courier app, customer tracking pages and a set of warehouse tools, each by a different team and each with its own buttons, colours and patterns. Shipping anything that crossed products took weeks of negotiation.
The challenge
Parcelwise asked me to lead the creation of Halo, a design system every team would share. The hard part wasn't designing components. It was making something that seven product teams would choose to use.
The approach
We began with an audit of every screen across the products, which turned up 41 different button styles and 17 shades of the same blue. From there we defined a small set of design tokens for colour, type, spacing and motion, and built the most-used components first, in Figma and in code at the same time.
- Every component ships with usage guidance, accessibility notes and live examples.
- Tokens are themeable, so the courier app can stay high-contrast for outdoor use while the tracking pages match the brand.
- A rotating group of contributors from each team reviews changes every two weeks, so the system belongs to everyone.
The outcome
A year on, Halo is used by more than 200 designers and engineers every day. New screens ship in half the time they used to, and every core component meets WCAG 2.2 AA.
