Aviva

Scaling a design system from a style guide to a global framework adopted across 7 markets.

Aviva is a multinational financial services company providing insurance, wealth, and retirement products to approximately 31 million customers worldwide. The company was migrating its global web estate to Adobe Experience Manager, and needed a design system that could scale across markets without fragmenting. What existed was version 2.0, essentially a style guide with basic atoms and a few simple molecules. It wasn't flexible enough to support the complexity of a global rollout, and there was no contribution model, no template layer, and no process for markets to adopt the system without rebuilding from scratch.

I was hired as a Senior Designer to work on the Aviva Poland redesign to AEM, drawing on my experience of platform migrations from my time at BT. While designing for Poland, I noticed the existing design system patterns lacked the flexibility needed for real-world use: components that couldn't adapt to different content structures, no variant coverage, no responsive flexibility. I started redesigning them with full variant coverage, an approach I'd used at BT and on a personal project. That work caught attention, and my scope expanded. I became Lead Designer on the Global Framework team, responsible for scaling Ion, the design system, across all of Aviva's markets.

I made a decision early that shaped everything that followed: I commuted to the Norwich office four times a month to work directly with the development team, rather than collaborating remotely from London. That was the thing that actually moved the system forward. Developers trusted the design team because we showed up, and that trust meant design decisions landed faster and with less friction. That team became the most collaborative and cohesive I've worked with in my career.

The system progressed through clear stages following Atomic Design methodology. Version 2 was atoms. By v3 we had molecules and organisms, data visualisation components like donut charts, and primary navigation. By v4 we had templates, which were specifically useful for global markets because teams could adopt page templates and make tweaks for their own requirements rather than rebuilding from scratch. Ion covered more than visual patterns: it included global experience principles, development standards for performance and progressive enhancement, accessibility standards with ARIA and keyboard control specifications, a UI pattern library of 200+ components, and documentation guides for both designers and developers. That template layer is what unlocked global adoption across UK, Ireland, Canada, Singapore, Australia, Poland, and France. My last release was v4.8 on 29 March 2019. The system continued to evolve after I left, reaching v5.0 with breaking changes for accessibility enhancements and continuing into incremental releases beyond that.

Adoption was the other half of the job. I treated the system as a community rather than a gatekeeping function. Every product team had a design system liaison to help us identify opportunities for contributions. We triaged new patterns against a simple threshold: is there global reuse? If yes, it's a contribution to Ion. If no, it's a snowflake, a one-off pattern the product team owns. For remote markets, we ran office hours where teams from other regions could drop in and share work. We had a bi-weekly 7am sync with Aviva Australia. I also ran monthly design all-hands updates for the 70+ designers across Aviva London and globally. Improving agile processes, expanding the team from 3 to 7 designers, and optimising how we designed in Sketch and handed off to developers moved the release cadence from quarterly to monthly and contributed to a 30% decrease in time to market for product teams using Ion.