Decathlon
A new design system, rolled out in very little time, and a renewed app with no friction for its users.
Upgrading the Decathlon app to today's design standards
Decathlon wanted to bring its iOS and Android mobile app up to date, align it with today's design standards and improve user engagement. They gave us a set of already defined User Stories to analyse and design and, in parallel, asked us for a roadmap for the product's future evolution. The challenge was to deeply renew an app that already had users without the change feeling like a break.
Design team manager
As Design Manager I led a team of four people, myself included, in a role that combined managing the team with ownership of the design system. My job was to organise the design work so that development could move forward in parallel with us, and to keep the team aligned with Decathlon's goals throughout the year the project lasted.
A roadmap built to deliver in blocks
We started with a market analysis to spot features that could be brought into the app, taking advantage of the change we were about to make. With that in hand we defined a high-level strategic roadmap to guide the product's evolution over the following months.
We had to prioritise deliveries so that development could work in parallel with us. So we organised both the design system and the screens into blocks of sections, which we delivered as each one was closed. That way development was never left waiting and the project moved forward without bottlenecks.
A design system built on Vitamin
We didn't start from scratch: we took Vitamin, Decathlon's design system, as our base and adapted it to the app's needs. We mapped the whole app, developed the user stories and built the component library: we defined new components, organised the interfaces and redesigned the user flows. Building on Vitamin kept the app consistent with the rest of Decathlon's products and gave us speed.
The whole app, with the new system
We redesigned the entire app using the component library we had built. Each block of screens reached development ready to implement and with components already tested, which kept the whole app consistent and sped up deliveries.
What we achieved
- A new design system, rolled out in very little time.
- A major change to the app without users feeling any friction.
- Design and development working in parallel, thanks to delivery in blocks.
