Building the SHUI Enterprise Design System
Overview
I and the SHUI Core Team created the Siemens Healthineers UI (SHUI) Enterprise Design System to unify design language and accelerate development across Molecular Imaging applications. We made the case with the Executive team, who were so convinced they issued a formal org-wide mandate to get it done.
The system introduced much needed usabilty tenets and addressed inconsistencies across a wide range of internal software products used by clinical, engineering, and support staff across a myriad of imaging modalities.
The Problem - Scale Over Time & Poorly Managed UX Debt
Influencing Leadership To Bless a Design System
The heavily siloed business lines and imaging modalities across Siemens Healthineers led to an inconsistent, unplanned set of design schemes that diluated the brand, reduced usability and effectiveness and increased risk.
With each business line maintaining separate products, frameworks, and teams, there were inefficiencies in designing UI elements repeatedly, leading to conflicts in both design and process.
SHUI Core Team
A core team of senior design leaders was formed to mitigate the problem. A unified design system was proposed as the solution, and in time the proposal was approved and prioritized by C-suite leadership.
The Core Team worked with the PMO, Engineering, Product, Marketing, Support and the executive team to define the scope of work, evaluated and chose a vendor agency design parter (IDEO), and produced several design theme candidates for extended evaluation.
Building the Design System - Core SHUI Team
SHUI Core Team members began working on the SHUI Design System while also noting that a design sytem alone was not enough. Processes had to change as well. A series of phases was laid out to govern xBL involvement, from discovery to initial versions of the design system, and then phases in which each business line would ship mature versions of their products built with SHUI. This allowed project management to create project plans (multiple year projects) to comply with the executive mandate to adopt SHUI for all releases past a certain cutoff date.
Each core team designer selected sample product screens and produced mockups based on each of three design approaches, and detailed the pros and cons of each approach in terms of feasibility, ease of transition, usability for target personas and perceptions of the 'FIT' with the Siemens brand.
Core and extended teams apply SHUI theme across the board. Once we chose the theme, we began exploring how to map the design system to high level elements shared across business lines, and then to specific imaging modalities, products and screens.
Usability testing was a priority, and specific user flows were selected per imaging modality, and tested with both internal SMEs and end users, facilitted by static screens and interactive prototypes.
Building the Design System - Collaboration
Next came the "SHUI Transition", the process of working with each business line's product management, engineering, and design teams to prioritize and schedule the transition for each product over to SHUI. Due to release cycles , budgets and time, this phase required much negotiation, persistence and influence to ensure success.
Happy Endings
A new, cohesive design system was born!
Each business line and imaging modality gradually built their products using the new SHUI design system for release across their product catalogs, in parallel with defining phased timelines for hardware and software testing, compliance, release and longterm support.
The breadth and depth of this undertaking is hard to overstate. See the scope for yourself, in the wide range of imaging solutions across all the business lines, from software to hardware.s
