Design for the product you want, not the product you have

At Klue, we built a rocket ship 🚀 in record time! Our “fail fast, fail often” mindset has helped us achieve tremendous success in establishing an industry-leading platform for competitive enablement, now used by over 500 businesses, in just a few short years.

Credit goes to our outstanding engineering team for implementing best practices early that helped us achieve a high level of stability and polish throughout the early stages of building our competitive intelligence technology. Collaborative design, regular bug bashes, and continuous documentation of engineering efforts and the processes which drive them have all contributed to our successful launch and ongoing explosive growth.

Although we’ve achieved great success in product quality, we recognize that things aren’t perfect. Different teams vary (sometimes significantly) in the ways they document and plan their efforts. Visual design and stylistic decisions aren’t always consistent across new feature developments, leading to areas where our user experience (UX) can certainly be improved.

We don’t just want to make those improvements though - we want to improve how we improve, so that fewer improvements are required in the future and when they are, they’re easier and faster to implement.

Continuous process improvement is the motivating factor behind our creation of Klue’s Design System team. A design system is a set of standards, including reusable components and patterns, that helps a product development team scale as it grows and design requirements become more complex, with a greater risk of redundancy and duplication between parts.

Now that Klue has 200+ employees, with multiple teams involved in the coordination, development, and production of new features, having a set guide for designers and engineers to follow when prototyping and implementing features has become increasingly crucial to our continued success.

Here at Klue we’re taking inspiration from established giants who’ve paved the way with the creation of their own influential design systems. Efforts like the gorgeous Atlassian design language and Apple’s influential human interface guidelines inspire us to a high standard of excellence as we pave the way for improved standardization in Klue design with our own internal system.

Our design system is a forward-looking initiative, intended to facilitate continuous improvement of our product, and hopefully one day position Klue as a leader not only in competitive enabled software, but also more broadly in the design of all software as a service (SaaS).

They say to dress for the job you want, not the job you have. At Klue, we’re dressing up our design processes with a better system to reach new heights of product development.

Want to see how the Klue app design evolves first-hand?

Visit our website to request a demo.