Accenture

CIO Digital Studio Design Systems

The Accenture Support portal orchestrates and automates workflows across the enterprise. The CIO digital studio is responsible for enhancing employee experience and governing and maintaining the content on the platform.

My Role

Design language
UI/ UX design

Problem

The support model is designed to prioritize employee experience by being simple, intuitive, and offering multiple ways to interact with the support organization. As the platform evolved and more content was added, there arose a need to identify and unify universal patterns and use cases to ensure information is organized and displayed cohesively and effectively.

Process

Our goal was to provide a single, accessible, cost-effective, and innovative platform for end-to-end support services, minimizing the impact of incidents on employee productivity. To achieve this vision, we analyzed the most used features across prioritized services to determine how to integrate all requirements and options into a harmonious and efficient user experience.

We discovered that containers and tables are the most frequently used components across our services. Since each use case differs, it was crucial to establish a scalable and aesthetically pleasing design language. This guided us in creating adaptable patterns for various scenarios. Additionally, we developed documentation that outlines standards and best practices for easy reference.

Unifying Information Display

The primary goal for displaying information is to ensure organized content with a clear hierarchy. Although the content varies across different scenarios, we established fundamental guidelines to guidelines to achieve this:

Use Sufficient White Space: Enhances readability and presents information clearly.
Maintain Consistent Margins: Keep a uniform distance between content and edges to prevent clutter.
Group Related Elements: Naturally guides users through the content.

Design Tokens

The employees frequently engage in consulting and analytical work, spending extensive time on screens daily. The dark mode option is essential to reduce eye strain, improve readability, and increase focus. We use design tokens as the fundamental values to build and maintain our design system. These tokens streamline design updates and act as a shared language between design and code, encompassing spacing, typography, color, and object styles. They seamlessly switch between light and dark modes.

Responsive Design

There is a need to extend the support experience to a mobile Accenture Support app for times when employees are not connected to their laptops. To adapt to different screen sizes without distortion, we set up a 12-8-4 column grid system as the breakpoint. This facilitates the creation of responsive pages from fixed-size elements, ensuring compatibility across various devices.

Accessibility

We remove barriers in the workplace to enhance accessibility. Our new color palette meets AAA accessibility standards, ensuring all design elements have sufficient contrast in various contexts to communicate meaning consistently.

Typography

Graphik is Accenture’s primary typeface. Its various weights accommodate different contexts and enhance the legibility of small text. This typeface helps emphasize information hierarchy and uses negative space to create distance or make content stand out.

Button

Interactive buttons are crucial UI elements as they are the main visual indicators of user actions. Our buttons underwent extensive scrutiny and numerous iterations to ensure they meet our standards.

Iconography

Icons play a crucial role in reducing text overload and enhancing efficiency. They add a touch of joy and make the experience more approachable. We designed stroke and filled icon weights to harmonize with various content without being overpowering.

Result

The design system is part of an ongoing transformation effort. While it’s too early to measure the lasting impact on engagement, efficiency, and satisfaction, the launch of unifying and evolving a large-scale design system is a significant step toward organizing information and providing a consistent experience. This initiative marks a giant leap toward achieving employees' goals more efficiently.