Mobile App Design System

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints has supported over 20+ mobile applications. With so many different applications, user needs, iOS, android, consistency of brand identity can be challenging – especially across a large organization with multiple design and development teams. One of the challenges of creating a design system that will support so many different mobile apps is not just how to make them look consistent, but also how to still allow each application to maintain a look and feel that is unique to itself while still staying consistent with a global church brand.

The Solution

Following the atomic design philosophy, I made the decision to identify a set of global styles and components that could be used across all 20+ of the church’s mobile applications. A global symbols library was then created for both iOS as well as Android. Then, in an effort to maintain uniqueness in brand, a UI kit was then made for each application consisting of both the global components as well a smaller subset of components unique to each application. This allowed each design and dev team the flexibility of still being able to develop patterns and interactive solutions unique to their specific application, while still staying consistent with the church’s global brand identity.

The Outcome

A robust cascading design system that allowed updates to cascade through each individual mobile application. I also setup these various symbol libraries to run from Abstract so that we could manage proposals and additions to the design system from each individual product team. The result was amazing. As we began to refactor each mobile application to better fit the newly implementing brand style guide, several mobile applications were re-designed in the new design system within a matter of hours.