What makes you and me experience the insurance company's digital platforms in a good, efficient, and consistent way, whether we want to insure our dog, report water damage, or check how much we'll receive in pension? The answer is a good design system.
Gjensidige is a leading Nordic insurance company listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange and has been offering insurance services for over 200 years. In Norway, they also offer pensions and savings. The company has around 3800 employees and offers insurance products in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the Baltic countries. Gjensidige's vision is that they should know the customer best and care the most. This should characterize the company's solutions and development agenda and be a hallmark of the Gjensidige brand.
Building blocks put in place
At Gjensidige, the design system is central to how digital services are developed and managed. Developers, designers, product owners, and editors all use the system to develop all of the company's digital services.
What is a design system?
A design system ensures that a company or organization communicates consistently across digital platforms while maintaining an overarching visual direction that is important for brand management and identity.
A design system is a digital toolbox that contains pre-coded and reusable components, graphics, colours, fonts, as well as guidelines on how all elements should be used. The components are designed, coded, and tested to work together and ensure compliance with accessibility laws.
Designers and developers use the components in the design system to build digital solutions.
– The technical knowledge of the design tool Figma has also been particularly useful for quickly migrating the design system. It has had an impact on many delivery teams throughout Gjensidige who use it.
Kristian Trengereid
Visual Design Lead, Gjensidige Builders
The design system consists of components or "building blocks" with detailed and interactive documentation on how they should be used, whether it's about appearance or functionality. These building blocks include buttons and other interaction elements with guidelines for universal design or how menus and navigation can efficiently guide users to complete an action.
Itera provides consulting services and designs to further develop the design system so that Gjensidige's brand can both appear consistent and communicate consistently in line with its identity.
Among other things, we have been involved in developing a documentation platform in Storybook and work together in interdisciplinary teams at Gjensidige to maintain and further develop the components that are used.
From Sketch to Figma
Gjensidige wanted to streamline its design work more effectively. A central part of this process was migrating from the Sketch design tool to Figma.
The major advantage of Figma is that it is 100% cloud-based.
The major advantage of Figma is that it is 100% cloud-based. This means that anyone working on designing, prototyping, or developing digital services can work simultaneously from anywhere just like using other cloud-based tools such as Miro or Google Docs. The cloud-based solution also facilitates easier sharing of designs. Itera's team at Gjensidige has extensive experience with Figma which helped provide guidance regarding a new improved design architecture in Figma enabling smoother collaboration between designers from different departments as well as more agile handover to developers.
To ensure that the transition to a new design tool would be as smooth as possible Itera conducted several introduction sessions providing training in Figma for employees at Gjensidige.
"The team from Itera has been instrumental in improving and further developing our design system at Gjensidige over time. They quickly became an integrated part of our Builders team responsible for the design system. The technical knowledge of the Figma design tool has been particularly useful for quickly migrating our design system which affected many delivery teams throughout Gjensidige who use it," says Kristian Trengereid , visual Design Lead - Gjensidig Builders.
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