JLL Design System

Carefully crafted, global design system built for JLL-wide adoption

Having grown primarily via regional acquisitions over the past few decades, the products and technologies that came together to form JLL Technologies had very little in common from a user experience perspective. Some products had significant market share but were designed by teams of independent contracted engineers. Other products were built recently in-house but had been designed and built in vacuums within the regionally managed engineering culture. Essentially, the tech stack and product offerings lacked brand consistency and cohesive interaction models, leading to user experience challenges.

ROLE

VP of Product Design, Hands-on Design Direction, cross-division and multi-disciplinary leadership & evangelism

SCOPE

Cross-disciplinary coordination many engineering teams, several design teams, brand and marketing

AUDIENCE

Designers/Developers at JLL

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PROBLEM

As the first VP of Design for JLL, I took on the challenge of unifying a sea of disparate products to create a cohesive and on-brand user experience across the JLLT offerings. I not only thought about the brand style but also common interaction models and product integrations, connecting our offerings where we could.

STRATEGY

I began with an internal audit, surveying the current state of products company-wide and interviewing key stakeholders in cross-functional teams. I then hired and mentored my own cross-disciplinary team of designers, researchers and technologists. Together, we spent nearly a year designing a modern, unified design system to be used across all products and websites for JLLT.

SOLUTION

The result was a JLL Design System which included more than 300 components, connected more than 12 products with key user touchpoints, and provided consistent branding across all JLLT offerings adopting the design system. Due to the variety of frameworks leveraged across the disparate products, adoption of the JLL Design System took time and leadership skill to build buy-in. I evangelized the JLL Design System across divisions and supported implementation with my team’s development resources, facilitating adoption across the company.