Brand
Cozi
My Role
Product Designer and Process Consultant
Year
2020
Cozi is an application, both native and web, that allows families to sync their daily plans, meals, and lists. They were in the process of unifying and renovating their application across all platforms their app appeared on. My director brought me on to help with their experience and design systems needs with the idea that the system would be the basis for the build of all Meredith (Allrecipes.com, Swearby.com, People.com, etc.) native applications going forward.
I got the ball rolling early, becoming a prominent voice in the product planning, listening to their story and what their future goals were with the tight timetable they had left. I offered my thoughts and guided the CEO, product, dev, and marketing teams on experience best practices which helped shape their vision and roadmap.
I audited the existing application and streamlined that into a base design system that unified the experience, styling, and components. I set guidelines for compliance and offered solutions to choose from as their current designs were out of spec in many major areas. Components and their usage were heavily documented with the understanding that the system guide would be referenced by the product team, designers, and developers.
The system’s source files were created with robust and reusable symbols. I built a full icon library, a wireframe library for design ideation, and a design guide library loaded with components that are updated as new Cozi app features are added. Couple these changes with time-tested design processes we also introduced and the speed and ease in which screens and features could get designed was drastically improved.
What about getting stakeholder buy-in and handing off the work to the dev team? We met weekly with both teams, introducing applications and software to the teams along the way that streamlined the tasks. Dev teams had all the information, documentation, extensive designs to reference, and assets they could pull when needed.
The changes were well received, headaches were cured, and a new path was paved without all the cracks that existed before. The system and it’s processes were a learning experience that have become our North Star for application builds.
The consulting and direction I did are difficult to illustrate, so below are some examples demonstrating the challenges faced, tools introduced, and resources that were created. Click on any image to view it in more detail.
