Moving forward

SET UP A CUTTING EDGE DESIGN SYSTEM IN 10 DAYS?
HOLD MY RED BULL 💦

Achievable - given a solid set of digital brand guidelines or established visual language. Lacking that, utilise output from a design direction workshop or, at the very least, have a good idea of where the look and feel of the UI should head, given company strategy and vision.

There was none of the above.

WHO, AND WHY ARE PERKBOX?

Perkbox are a people experience platform and a positive, progressive product company.

Their own people are critical thinkers and creative problem solvers; a modern, energetic workforce with wide ranging interests, which naturally enrich culture, wellbeing, support and performance.

The leadership team work towards a vision of building a better society and strengthening their clients’ organisations from the inside by empowering their people. To do so, they continually investigate what drives an employee’s experience at work, and motivates and challenges a team.

They currently redefine PX for business customers across a large variety of sectors, and work closely with Trainline, Deliveroo, Purple Bricks, Holland & Barrett, Rentalcars and Wasabi, to name but a few.

WALKING THE WALK: THE BASICS.

New open plan offices, well stocked V/VG friendly fridges, premium coffee ✔️
’Happiness Lab’ chillout area, beer tables, sofas, pool- and ping-pong tables, game station ✔️
Regular Yoga sessions, wellbeing and mental health workshops ✔️
Monthly high-profile external speakers, info sessions, launchpad events for n00bs ✔️
Epic Slack bantz on the P+E channels 🦈
Office dogs, frequency capped to only 5 per day 😀

↑ Perkbox brand values

A MOTLEY CRUI

I joined Perkbox at an intriguing juncture: the profound shift from a local, single product B2B employee happiness provider, to a global, multi-product, B2B2C Employee Experience platform.

To complicate matters a tad further, a brand refresh had been kicked off by visionary Head of Creative Karla Mulder and her team.

A number of nascent products had recently been established, each bolstered with dedicated squads of product managers, designers and a merge conflict of engineers.

Voracious product growth at ludicrous speed had inevitably resulted in some hefty UI design debt.
It was time to pay. 💸

To be able to elevate a brand, one needs to learn about its visual roots.
To appreciate an organisation’s heritage, a deep dive brand audit is always a good start. This includes recording, and evaluating, current on- and offline visual presence, across as many channels as possible, in as little time as necessary to get reliable results.
Then, company purpose and mission become the cornerstones amidst which to place impressions of spaces, people and ways of working.

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, presumably musing on deep dive brand audits

A combination of all the above then becomes part of the systematic process of capturing the today, and the inception of the creative process of outlining the potential tomorrow for a brand, product, and subsequent UI system.

TL;DR: UI consistency fail requires analysis

↑ proposed structure + sections, first draft

System failure

Fast forward 10 days: my solid skeleton structure of a design system was in place, but no sufficiently evolved brand elements available to apply to it yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We decided to park it.

I was repositioned to work on enhancing the new Perkbox Medical product, and work closely with the Marketing design team on the impending Brand Evolution.

Think big box

The Perkbox Brand Evolution, still ongoing, became a rich, cross-team collaboration over a number of months, and resulted in a slow rollout of singular elements of the new visual language, which were rigorously tested in real world environments.

Below are some of the explorations and consecutive solutions produced.