Maxine Zhou About

Convex Design System

Enterprise design system migration

Led a design system migration across a 16-product insurance ecosystem, cutting custom components by 94% and establishing governance across three design agencies.

Overview

Overview

Our Design Team

  • Design System Designer (me)
  • Design Manager

Timeline

March – December 2025 (10 months)

My Core Deliverables

  1. Four products migrated, three in active progress
  2. Design library fully built, aligned with Storybook
  3. Documentation and governance frameworks established
  4. Design team culture transformed from siloed to collaborative
  5. Client set up to scale the system independently

The Product

An internal underwriting application for insurance teams to review and triage submissions, manage workflows, and make faster and more confident decisions.

Impacts

49components with full tokenisation and documentation
35% → 2%reduction in custom components (core product pilot)
10designers across three agencies aligned
7products migrated or in progress
Challenge

The Challenge

The client operated 16+ products built by multiple contractors, with significant operational challenges:

What my role brought

Before

Ad-hoc components, inconsistent spacing, and a narrower activities panel with no tab structure.

Submission detail screen before migration, with a light header and a two-tab activities panel

After

Design system components throughout, semantic tokens, and a fuller Activities Hub with five tabs.

The same submission detail screen after migration, using design system components and a five-tab Activities Hub
Approach

Four phases over ten months

Phase 1
Foundation building

  1. Built the Design Library covering the full product ecosystem
  2. Tokenised design foundations and component documentation
  3. Established a cleaned-up Storybook as the single source of truth
  4. Provided designer support infrastructure across all three agencies
The assembled design library, showing components, variants and typography documentation across the product ecosystem
Flow diagram of the component contribution process, from an ad-hoc request through to a light, medium or heavy contribution
Phase 2 · Governance & quality assurance

Phase 2
Governance & Quality Assurance

  1. Conducted UX audits and regular design check-ins across agencies to identify drift
  2. Documented an Exception Framework for when deviations make sense, balancing system integrity with design flexibility
  3. Hosted pattern workshops across agencies to identify reusable patterns

The Challenge I faced at Phase 2

What happened?

While reviewing mockups I noticed many components were heavily customised — spacing, padding and text weights all differed from the design system.

The tension

Product designers wanted to preserve user familiarity.
The design system manager questioned the purpose of migration if the visuals stayed unchanged.

What I did to solve it
  1. Clarified intent:
    Migration means technical adoption and gradual alignment, not forced visual conformity.
  2. Defined a path forward:
    Phase 1 — design system components with overrides;
    Phase 2 — reassess after research and user acceptance testing.
  3. Process improvement:
    Proposed an Exception Framework to document justified divergences from the system.
Message to the design team proposing the Exception Framework
Taking the proposal to the whole team, in the open.

Phase 3
Strategic Migration

We ran a low-risk pilot on a simple product to validate the process and build team confidence, then migrated the essential product to showcase impact.

During migration, we fixed some UX issues, applied semantic tokens, and improved predictability with a unified visual language.

Result: 35% → 2% custom components

A UX audit table listing issues, notes, effort and priority found during the migration
A calendar of recurring design system rituals — design catchups, critiques and office hours — alongside a dev handoff checklist

Phase 4
Scaling & Enablement

  1. Transformed siloed agencies into a collaborative community
  2. Completed four product migrations, three in progress, planned completion by the end of the year
  3. Client equipped to continue independently with established processes
Impact

Impact for the business

  1. Drastic reduction in design and handoff time as system coverage grew
  2. A migration approach proven through a pilot that other teams can replicate
  3. The team now owns and evolves the design system together