Kamera Express sells cameras and everything around them, from stores across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg, and from a shop that serves all of it. The company is about thirty years old and the site has grown alongside it.
Several designers built a design system for that shop. My part was the account section, the cart and checkout, the product detail pages and the product cards.
A design system is usually described as tidying up: one button instead of nine. That’s the easy half.
The hard half is what turns up while you do it. Breaking a page into components means reading it properly, and reading these pages turned up flows that didn’t work - steps that asked for the same thing twice, states nobody had drawn, patterns that had been copied rather than decided. Naming a component fixes none of that.
So the work ran on two tracks at once. One was the system: components, their states, and the rules for using them. The other was research and redesign of the flows that componentising kept exposing - so what was wrong got designed properly instead of being rebuilt faithfully.
My share was the stretch where money changes hands. Product cards and detail pages, where somebody decides; the cart and checkout, where they commit; the account section, where they come back. Some of it was conversion work.
The shop draws on the system - the product cards and detail pages, the cart, the checkout and the account section among them.
The fixes the build turned up went in alongside it, rather than onto a list for a project that might never be scheduled.
