Transforming BigTime into a Unified Design System

UX Director   |   Made at BigTime, 2023-25

The Team: 
UX Director & Product Lead: Gretchen Nash
UX Designers: Jan Starzyk, Emily Lee, Bartosz Ujma, Waldek Strzelczyk, Monika Gontarz
Development: Angel Rodriguez, Will Thomas, Ani Singh, Jakub Rekas, Bartek Harmaczyński

Over 20 years of continuous development on a custom Angular-based system left BigTime’s expanding UI with a patchwork of styles and patterns, lacking a unified system and guidelines. As the product matured, the absence of a centralized design system became more apparent: slowing development, creating inconsistencies, and limiting scalability. 

Seeing a clear opportunity to simplify design and engineering workflows, I partnered with two front-end engineering leads and our UX team to kickstart a front end development team. We formed a focused “tiger team” that was united around a shared goal: to build a modern, scalable design system that could evolve alongside our products. This system would streamline development times, create consistency, and empower teams across the organization to deliver cohesive, high-quality user experiences

What started as a grassroots project has now become our platform’s design backbone.

Our Approach

With a nimble team, we kept things practical by folding design system work into active projects so we could make steady progress, stay visible, and show value as we went. Here are some ways that we started the project:

• Start with active roadmaps: We aligned design system updates into live roadmap features, ensuring steady investment along the way.

• Align on tools: We adopted Figma for design specs, Storybook + Chromatic for documentation and visual testing.

• Create shared visibility: A front-end-development JIRA board helped us track weekly component needs and team capacity.

• Scale asynchronously: Slack and async workflows supported communication across time zones and teams.

• Team Ceremonies: We conducted bi-weekly team sprint planning, demos, and retrospectives to refine our processes and capacity planning.

This phased approach let us build momentum, deliver value early, and stress-test the components in production across environments.

Design System Foundations

We refreshed our core design language with flexibility and scalability in mind:

• New Tokens: Colors, typography, spacing, elevation

• Foundational Components: Buttons, inputs, grids, status indicators, tables

• Color Themes: Vibrant, dark mode, and an AI palette

• Expanded Variants: Size, state, interaction, accessibility-states

This sytem is designed to grow over time, evolving alongside the product as new patterns and features are added to the roadmap.

Breakdown of Components & Variants:

Our design system includes around 40 core components and nearly 200 documented variants, forming a scalable and reliable foundation for product development. By standardizing interaction patterns and visual styles, it reduces tech debt, accelerates implementation, and ensures a cohesive user experience across platforms.

Enabling Scale Through a Consultative Model

What began as a focused effort by a four-person tiger team is now scaling through a consultative support model:

• Partnering with developers to surface reusable components

• Offering best practices guidance, documentation, and Figma resources

• Code and design reviews for consistency and architecture

• Encouraging new contributions from both design and engineering team.
  
  

This shift empowered teams to move faster without reinventing the wheel, while staying aligned in both UX patterns and technical architecture. It also gave designers and developers a shared sense of ownership and a framework for contribution.

UX & Visual Refinements

Beyond system infrastructure, each release was a chance to elevate the user experience through small, but high-impact areas:

• Responsive breakpoints were added across web, mobile, and tablet screens

• Defined UX copy rules for clarity and consistency

• Improved visual feedback and navigation models

• Integrated UX motion to the component library for the first time

• Evolved brand expression through refined spacing, typography, and iconography

• Established system-wide rules for things like: primary button placements, table alignment, modal behavior, panels, UX writing, lexicon, and tooltips.

Outcomes & Impact

What started as a small passion project is driving consistency and efficiency. Every new release now leverages the design system, which cuts design and development time in half and eliminates guesswork. There is no more ambiguity around colors, components, and patterns. Features like dark mode, once hardcoded and fragmented, are now easily implemented in minutes through system-level theming rules.

Beyond improved speed and scale, the system also deepened collaboration and trust between design and engineering. It gave us a shared language and a centralized toolkit that balances flexibility with guardrails. Today, the design system is not only widely adopted, it’s actively maintained and extended through a consultative model that empowers teams to build with quality & confidence.