Ante Kristo
Product
Strategy
& Design
CARL ZEISS
Carl Zeiss, a major player in the medical field, offers a wide range of (digital) products across various departments and units, encompassing desktop applications, apps, web, and HMI.
Working alongside the UX/UI department, my role involved shaping a new design vision to ensure each digital product aligns with Zeiss's brand values. I focused on achieving consistency across all products and implementing a design system and DesignOps to enhance process efficiency moving forward.
ROLE
Design Direction & Lead
Product Design UX(UI
Services
Design Direction
Design System
Design Operations
UX/UI
Management
Coaching & Mentoring
The Team
20+
Multidisciplinary
"The clear, well-structured, and logically designed "ZEISS User Interfaces (ZUi)" system works like a modular kit, ensuring that the software applications distinctly represent the Zeiss brand and consistently deliver a positive and uniform user experience."
Challenges
The project was situated in a highly complex and regulated medical environment. Multiple complex products and structures, managed by various units, led to intricate workflows.
This resulted in teams working in isolation, with digital products that were visually and functionally outdated. Diverse coding languages and platforms, along with numerous complex components, added to the complexity. The absence of a centralized system for components meant every unit developed its product independently.
Outdated style guides in PDF format were not optimized for digital assets/products and were too superficial and intricate to be practical. The use of outdated and inefficient software for product design contributed to significant inconsistency and inefficiency across the products.
Strategy
The strategy involved analyzing current team structures, the specific pain points, and needs of different departments through stakeholder interviews, reviewing existing processes and design team structures, and auditing individual products, assets, and components. A clear roadmap was established, along with the formation of a small project committee comprising various stakeholders.
Solution
A detailed product and design vision was crafted to establish visual consistency across interdisciplinary products.
Due to its extreme complexity, it was crucial to develop a clean and functional design language that complements Zeiss's physical products and brand. Nonetheless, a clean design can quickly become dull, so we infused more vitality into the design with strategic color use and created visual tension with spacing. All the while, we ensured that content and functions were presented in an organized and clear manner.
The adoption of advanced design tools like Figma enabled the creation of a comprehensive design system and associated DesignOps, optimizing workflows for efficiency.
A web component library platform was developed, reducing code duplication and ensuring UI and UX consistency across multiple projects, enhancing speed through component reuse, and promoting compatibility and standardization in design and code.
New collaborative and communicative work methods were embraced, streamlining design processes and reshaping team structures for heightened productivity.
Products and platforms underwent a strategic redesign to identify and smartly reconfigure component commonalities.
Clear design principles and guidelines were laid out, reinforcing a coherent design language as also efficient meeting structures were implemented to foster regular, productive, but balanced exchanges.
