As Evolent Health's scope of solutioning has grown, so has the need for additional tools and applications on the Identifi software platform. As the teams scaled to meet this challenge, we began to look at our design toolsets, and quickly realized that things were diverging when they should have been converging.
Without changes to the way that we worked, we were in danger of falling behind, and failing to deliver client commitments. We decided to try to address this challenge by investigating how we could work more effectively.
Prism was the result of that effort. An operational design system, Prism has allowed us to do more with less; supporting more application development with less design headcount, and giving us the opportunity to dedicate more time to learning about our end users.
Our design team was responsible for supporting more than 10 distinct development efforts, and needed something to help us find a framework for decision-making. We began our efforts with a series of interviews and conversations with our internal stakeholders in product and engineering.
The effort ultimately led to the adoption of six core Evolent design principles, which give us a north star with which to evaluate our work.
It wasn’t enough to establish a framework for decision-making. We needed to be speaking the same visual language. Establishing a library of Sketch components was a first step in this process.
Settling on a shared library helped the design team deliver more consistent screens, but did little to improve the efficiency of hand-off to engineering.
An effort to align our efforts with those in engineering gave us the opportunity to build out what has become Evolent’s design system: Prism. It’s given Evolent a shared language across design and engineering, and has led to far fewer mixups during the delivery phase of a given project.
Our guidelines and designs live alongside live code examples on an internal site that is accessible to anyone designing or building on the Identifi platform. It has allowed for improved collaboration across teams that are not co-located, and improved the velocity of more than one sprint team.