Caribou
Case Study
Caribou Logo

A New Design System for a New Brand.

Caribou components floating phone
In an effort to comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted confidential information and may have made changes to fill in the blanks in this case study. All information is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Caribou.
Caribou Design System
Context

Unicorn Startup Necessitates a Mature Design System

Caribou (formerly MotoRefi) had undergone a rebrand and had a new look but the design of the current application experience was disjointed and suffered from design debt and a lack of cohesion and consistency. At the same time the design team was rapidly scaling so needed a UI kit to empower rapid design iteration and brand consistency.
Caribou Phones Stacked
The Challenge

Create an Extensible Design System to Power a New Brand

How Might We extend the new brand for Caribou into the product? We had disjointed product experiences, lacked consistency across not only products but even pages within one experience not too mention different designers using different components and developers recoding components each time they touched new designs.

Goals

Design Consistency

Improved consistency across multiple products (B2C, B2B, and Internal apps).

Increased Design Speed

With a system, designers can work more quickly to focus more on problem solving.

Development Efficiencies

Empower engineers with a toolkit to increase speed and minimize repetitive coding elements.
Caribou Components
Results

The Impact

Rolled out a new design system (UI Kit and Component Library) to a team of 8 designers and several engineering teams supporting different products (B2C, B2B, Internal apps).

Introduced new ways of working more quickly with standardized components, Figma libraries and supporting code to cross over various code frameworks.

Designers spend less time reinventing the wheel and pushing pixels and more time where design is most valuable: solving problems.
Caribou mobile design
Jason Julien Product Design
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