CRISP Design System
Designing infrastructure for people who build products — Enterprise design system enabling alignment, trust, and velocity across multiple teams.
The Challenge
As CommentSold evolved its suite of features and platforms, our user experience was becoming fragmented. Designers, engineers, product managers, and QA across multiple teams were duplicating effort and making inconsistent decisions. This led to UI drift, slower delivery, and a lack of trust between design and engineering. The challenge wasn’t just to build a component library; we needed to create an organizational system that aligned everyone on one language of design and interaction, without slowing teams down.
My Role
As the Design Technologist / UX Engineer, I led both the technical implementation and the operational model of CRISP. That meant:
- Defining and building component APIs, design tokens, and documentation.
- Collaborating with designers and engineers to ensure patterns reflected real usage and could be consumed easily.
- Establishing contribution workflows, governance, and release processes that balanced consistency with autonomy.
- Evangelizing the system and supporting adoption, from onboarding to training sessions.
- Helping to build the UX engineering function at CommentSold alongside design leadership.
Approach and System Design
Treating the system as a product
From the outset, we treated CRISP as its own product. Rather than a static library, it was an evolving set of tools and guidelines. Components were designed around usage patterns, not just visual styles. For example, our form controls shared a parent abstraction that handled labels, validation, and error states—enforcing consistency while staying flexible.
Documentation and contribution
We invested early in clear, concise documentation and created a contribution model with lightweight governance. Designers and engineers could propose updates via a structured process, ensuring CRISP stayed relevant and was perceived as an enabler, not a bottleneck.
Governance and tradeoffs
We consciously chose not to solve every edge case centrally. Instead, we documented when teams should extend the system. Adoption was prioritized over theoretical purity; we’d rather have an imperfect system everyone used than a perfect one everyone avoided.
Results
- Full adoption for new features: CRISP became the default choice for new UI across all products.
- Accelerated velocity: Teams shipped faster and spent less time on cross-team design discussions, freeing them to focus on user problems rather than UI inconsistency.
- Improved collaboration: Design conversations moved from “what does this look like?” to “is this the right experience?”
- Reusable patterns: Components and patterns from CRISP were leveraged in new projects, reducing duplication and onboarding time.
Reflection
CRISP taught me that design systems are less about pixels and more about people. They are contracts between designers, engineers, and stakeholders. The success of a system hinges on the social layer—communication, trust, and shared ownership. This experience deepened my understanding of systems thinking, governance, and the balance between consistency and flexibility, and it remains a foundation of how I approach UX engineering today.