FREEWHEEL DESIGN
Role:
Associate UX Designer
Year:
/ 2021
Team Size:
11
Building a scalable design foundation for FreeWheel’s next generation of products.
Overview
FreeWheel's product ecosystem had grown significantly, but its design foundation hadn't kept pace. Teams were solving similar problems in different ways, creating inconsistencies across products and making it difficult to scale design and development efficiently.
I helped evolve FreeWheel's design system by auditing existing experiences, identifying patterns and gaps, contributing to the component library, and partnering with engineering to make the system easier to adopt across teams.
The Challenege:
The system wasn't keeping up with the product.
Inconsistent experiences
Similar patterns were being designed and implemented differently across products.
Limited scalability
Teams lacked a shared foundation for building new experiences efficiently.
Weak designer-engineer alignment
Design decisions weren't always translating consistently into production.
The opportunity wasn't simply to create more components. It was to establish a shared foundation that designers and engineers could confidently build on.
Objectives:
What were we trying to achieve?
01
Create consistency
Establish shared patterns across FreeWheel products.
02
Improve scalability
Give teams reusable foundations for designing new experiences.
03
Strengthen collaboration
Create a common language between Design and Engineering.
04
Increase adoption
Make the system easy for product teams to discover, understand, and use.
Process overview:
From audit to adoption.
Audit
Understand where the system was breaking down.
1
Research
Identify recurring patterns and user/team needs.
2
Build
Create and refine reusable components.
3
Document
Define how and when patterns should be used.
4
Enable
Help teams adopt the system through training and collaboration.
5
Auditing the experience
I reviewed existing product experiences to identify recurring patterns, inconsistencies, and gaps in the existing system. This helped prioritize where shared components could have the greatest impact.
Creating reusable patterns
Rather than designing isolated screens, I helped establish reusable patterns that could support multiple product contexts while maintaining consistency.
Bringing the system into products
The goal wasn't simply to create a library. The system needed to work in real product environments, where teams had different workflows and requirements.
Adoption + Impact:
A system is only useful if people use it.
Dcumentation
I helped establish documentation and usage guidance so designers and engineers could understand not only what components existed, but when and how to use them.
Enablement
I also trained 16 front-end engineers globally on Figma and Circle, helping teams build a shared understanding of the system.
Consistency
Shared patterns across FreeWheel experiences.
Efficiency
Reusable foundations reduced the need to solve common UI problems from scratch.
Alignment
A shared design language improved collaboration between Design and Engineering.
Reflection:
What I learned.
Lesson 1
A design system is a product, not a library
Lesson 2
Consistency doesn't mean rigidity
This project shifted how I think about product design, from creating individual experiences to creating systems that help other teams build better experiences.
Thanks for reading
