Executive summary
In the digital age, operational efficiency and brand consistency are pillars of success for any product. This article explores the experience of PedidosYa, a leading platform in Latin America, in implementing and renewing its design system. Through the perspectives of Nicolás Fornaro (Platform Engineer Director) and Alejandro Prieto (UX Director), we look at how this strategic investment not only solved scalability and consistency challenges, but also boosted key business metrics and improved the user experience. Discover crucial lessons and practical advice for leaders looking to optimize their digital teams and technology products.
Our podcast Digital Experience by Soho dives into the world of design systems, highlighting their crucial role in the efficiency and consistency of digital product development. In episode #94 of the podcast (in Spanish), Martin Picerno talked with Nicolás Fornaro, Platform Engineer Director, and Alejandro Prieto, UX Director at PedidosYa, about their extensive experience implementing and revamping their design system.
A necessary change: why revamp the design system?
PedidosYa, a leading platform in Latin America with millions of users, faced multiple challenges that made reworking its design system inevitable.
From a UX and brand equity perspective, Alejandro Prieto explained that the app didn’t sufficiently reflect the brand’s identity, with its characteristic red, curves and dynamism. In addition, the scale of the teams, divided into “tribes” (working groups focused on specific areas such as restaurants, groceries or payments), led to divergence in the look and feel of interface elements. This not only affected the user experience, but also steepened the learning curve for new users and created visual inconsistencies.
From a technology standpoint, Nicolás Fornaro pointed out that this divergence resulted in duplicated implementation effort. That directly affected key metrics such as:
- App size.
- The amount of data exchanged.
- Loading speed.
These factors directly affected the app’s smoothness and responsiveness, especially on mid- and low-end devices and on slow networks. The inconsistency wasn’t just a design problem, but an engineering challenge that translated into lower perceived quality for the user.
“The inconsistency in the design wasn’t just an aesthetic problem, but an engineering challenge that directly affected perceived quality and operational efficiency.”
The design system: design or engineering? An essential synergy
An interesting point in the conversation was the debate about the name “design system” and how it’s perceived. Alejandro argued that the name is perfect because it combines “design,” which is his domain, and “system,” which is the domain of engineering, reflecting the key synergy between the two areas.
Nicolás added that a design system is “many products in one,” since it’s the result of UX work to understand the user and the materialization of that in code, adapted to native platforms such as Android, iOS or the web. Both agreed that modern design involves the ability to plan a system with different parts that fulfill specific functions, going beyond mere aesthetics and focusing on the scalability and functionality of the digital product.
Key lessons and challenges overcome during implementation
PedidosYa’s experience implementing its design system left valuable lessons:
- Design system governance: The decentralization of the previous design system, while it allowed teams to create new components, led to an unmanageable proliferation of variants (for example, 11 versions of a restaurant “card” or 5 versions of a pop-up). This led PedidosYa to opt for a centralized system, in which the Platform and UXOps teams are the “owners” of the design system. While this guarantees consistency, it requires smooth communication and low latency to respond to the requests of many teams.
- Impact on the business and the user experience (UX): The revamp had a significant impact on key metrics. The main goal was not to “break anything,” and not only did the app’s health metrics not deteriorate, some of them even improved. Unification and efficiency in solving problems led to improvements in user conversion and retention. The project was initially called “Visual Revamp” and aimed to be a consistent, attractive “skin,” without changing the layout of elements so as not to disrupt users’ familiarity. The strategy paid off, with no significant drops in business metrics and a good reception from the user community on social media.
- The importance of culture and shared understanding: Nicolás Fornaro stressed the importance of not taking for granted that all developers are on the same page. While implementing the design system, they realized that not everyone interpreted the designs the same way or understood the importance of the work they were building. Giving meaning and purpose to the work, and establishing a shared culture and way of working, was crucial to improving the productivity and agility of the digital teams.
- The “wow moment” and the business’s trust: Building the design system meant a big investment and putting other initiatives on hold, which created the need to hold out through a period of long-term promises. However, a key milestone was presenting the revamp at a leadership event, where the updated app was put in the leaders’ hands. The reaction was one of amazement, which validated the effort and built confidence in the chosen path.
- Flexibility and adaptability: Alejandro Prieto highlighted that there are no “foolproof recipes” and that every company is its own world. It’s essential to know yourself as a company and as a team, identify strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to try and adapt models instead of clinging to what you know if it isn’t working.
- Platform as an enabler: Beyond being a living, evolving product, the design system is seen at PedidosYa as a platform. From an engineering perspective, it’s part of the “developer experience,” offering services and tools so developers can work efficiently, prioritizing consistency, quality and scalability. For design, the design system is replicated in tools like Figma, making handoff easier and letting designers focus on the user experience at a more strategic level, rather than on the syntactic details of the screen.
- Future challenges: accessibility and localization: Despite the achievements, PedidosYa acknowledges outstanding challenges. Accessibility is a priority, and although the design system’s architecture helps speed up work on it, it’s a topic that isn’t yet firmly rooted on the agenda of companies in Latin America. Another area of exploration is localization and regionalization, not just of content, but also of the experience and the interactions, so that the app resonates with the local reality of each of the 15 countries where they operate.
Key advice for leaders driving design systems
Nicolás Fornaro and Alejandro Prieto shared their key advice for leaders looking to drive design systems in their organizations and improve the efficiency of their digital teams:
From engineering (Nicolás Fornaro):
- Start small: Pick a few key components to focus the work and understand the challenges. This reduces the fear of starting a large-scale project.
- Get the tooling right: Having the tools needed to build, reuse and distribute the design system (CI/CD, quality checks) is essential for a smooth workflow and team productivity.
- Culture and shared understanding: Don’t assume all developers are on the same page. It’s crucial to give the work meaning and purpose, build a shared culture and way of working, and make sure everyone understands the importance of what’s being built.
From user experience (Alejandro Prieto):
- Understand the problems to solve: Run a thorough audit to clearly identify which problems the design system is meant to solve (consistency, brand equity, accessibility, etc.).
- Define the architecture together: The architecture should be tied to the problems to solve and to how the design system will be used. It’s vital that UX and developers collaborate on defining the architecture, establishing shared parameters, patterns and names to ensure an efficient workflow in the future.
- Don’t forget accessibility: Build usability and accessibility into the design system from the start, making sure aspects such as contrast, legibility and minimum type size are included by default. This makes future accessibility improvements to the app, and compliance with standards, easier.
PedidosYa’s experience shows that implementing a design system is a strategic investment with a transformational impact on the business, the user experience and operational efficiency. Constant dialogue between design and technology is the key to building a robust platform that can scale and deliver exceptional experiences to users in an increasingly complex digital environment.
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- Quantify the value of UX.
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- Implement or improve a strategic design system.
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Credits
As Director of Strategy and Innovation at Soho, he leads and oversees initiatives that drive growth and market differentiation. With more than 10 years of experience in the field, Martin has developed a strategic vision and a practical approach to delivering innovative, user-centered solutions that meet the needs and expectations of diverse audiences and markets.
