Alight Solutions is a global HR software platform reaching 35+ million users worldwide. The Alight Worklife Design System was developed to unify the visual and interaction language across products, while remaining flexible enough to scale and adapt to evolving needs.
Product teams across Alight were working from inconsistent UI kits, leading to fragmented experiences across the platform. My goal was to help establish a single source of truth — one that every team could access, trust, and build from.
I led the design side of a three-platform system — Figma for design, Zeroheight for documentation, and Storybook for development — ensuring every discipline had what they needed while staying in sync with the rest of the organization.
A living design system that evolves alongside product needs. By aligning on design decisions at the start of each project rather than mid-build, my work contributed to a 40% reduction in reworks.
Intake and Audit
Before the design system existed, design files and implemented UI varied significantly from project to project. Working in isolation, teams had created their own solutions, leading to an accumulated debt of inconsistencies across the platform.
I began by conducting a comprehensive audit of existing design files and patterns. This involved tracking down creative files across teams, documenting every component and pattern in use, and identifying where designs diverged from what was actually built. The goal was to understand the full scope of inconsistency before consolidating everything into a unified system.
With files collected, I cataloged 50+ components and patterns, categorizing everything directly in Figma. The most pervasive inconsistency we uncovered was spacing — teams had been applying it differently across projects, which made incorporating Figma's Auto Layout a key early priority to bring things into alignment. Changes and updates were documented in Zeroheight, and we kept the broader organization informed through biweekly and monthly company-wide emails. All tasks and projects were tracked in real-time through a centralized Jira backlog, giving the team clear visibility into progress at every stage.
With a full picture of the system's gaps in hand, we were ready to start building something better.
Once the files were collected and organized, I began a full cataloging of all design elements based on previous designs and products. I reviewed original files to identify recurring patterns and categorized them accordingly.
Building a Systematic Approach
With a complete inventory in hand, the question shifted from what's broken to how do we fix it at scale. I played an active role across all of it — running ceremonies, managing the backlog, and contributing as a designer — spanning the full spectrum of design system work: defining and building new components, documenting usage guidelines, and researching industry best practices to inform our decisions.
Defining Foundations
Cross-functional teams collaborated to establish the core foundations: color, typography, grid and spacing, accessibility standards, and brand elements. These became the building blocks for everything that followed.
I built these foundations as Figma component libraries with variants, establishing a team library that could be updated centrally and pushed to designers across the organization. This infrastructure ensured that when we refined a token or updated a style, every team could receive those improvements immediately — keeping everyone aligned without any extra lift.
Examples of components being used within the design system.
Establishing Tokens and Styles
As components and patterns took shape, establishing a shared token system became a top priority. I defined design tokens covering color, typography, spacing, and border radius and elevation — giving designers and developers a common language for styles across every product and platform.
Tokens were handed off directly in Figma, making it straightforward for developers to reference and implement styles without ambiguity. The real power of this approach showed up over time: when a style needed to change, updating a token cascaded improvements across the entire system instantly, rather than requiring manual updates component by component.
Prioritizing Through Governance
With tokens establishing a shared language, the next challenge was making sure the system could evolve without losing consistency. Governance became the mechanism that kept the design system honest over time. I helped establish a contribution model that gave product teams a clear path for requesting new components or proposing changes — without letting the system sprawl in ways that would recreate the fragmentation we'd just spent months cleaning up.
In practice, that meant defining what a "done" component looked like: documented in Zeroheight, reviewed by at least one designer and one developer, and stress-tested against real product scenarios before being published to the shared library. Change requests were triaged through the Jira backlog in our biweekly sprint cycles, which kept the backlog visible and prevented ad hoc updates from quietly introducing inconsistency. The result was a system that teams could trust — not just because it was well-built, but because there was a clear process for keeping it that way.
The most iterated component in the system — and the most used.
A Living System Across Three Platforms
The design system lives across three integrated platforms — Figma for design, Zeroheight for documentation, and Storybook for development. My focus was primarily on the design and documentation sides, ensuring components were well-defined in Figma and clearly documented in Zeroheight, while collaborating closely with developers on the Storybook implementation. When a component evolves on one platform, it's updated across all three — keeping designers, developers, and stakeholders aligned.
By establishing clear standards and resolving design decisions upfront rather than mid-project, we achieved a 40% reduction in reworks.
The Figma library serves as the living source of truth for designers. I maintained this library using Figma's branching feature, which allowed the team to test and refine updates before publishing them organization-wide. When changes went live, designers across Alight could update their files with a single click, ensuring everyone had access to the latest components and patterns.
Zeroheight provides comprehensive documentation for the design system, offering guidance on when and how to use each component. I contributed extensively to this documentation, writing usage guidelines, defining best practices, and ensuring that teams had the context they needed to implement components correctly and maintain consistency across products.
Storybook was where design met its final test. I worked directly alongside developers during implementation — not just handing off specs but pressure-testing components in code, catching edge cases that only show up at that stage, and iterating quickly when something didn't hold up. It made the handoff feel less like a handoff and more like a shared finish line.
Contact Me!
Phone: 309-258-6616
Email: kegan.flairty@gmail.com
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©2026 Kegan Flairty
Senior Product Designer