A design system built for consistency, accessibility, and scale across every digital touchpoint of one of Australia's largest private health insurers.
I led this project during my time as a Lead Designer at Wongdoody, working directly with one of Australia's largest private health insurers. The insurer had a design system of sorts, built in Sketch, but it was inaccessible to the wider team and largely unknown. My audit uncovered close to 20 different button styles in use across their digital products alone.
What needed to be built:
The brief was to bring order to a fragmented digital ecosystem and make the result accessible, consistent, and actually usable by designers and developers day to day.
Accessibility was a design requirement, not an afterthought. The insurer's audience includes people who are older, managing chronic conditions, or experiencing vision impairment, exactly the people who most need to find health information quickly and without friction.
I addressed text sizing first. The previous 12 to 14px standard fell below best practice for this audience, and a new typography scale became a non-negotiable part of the system. I audited the full colour palette for contrast compliance and documented approved colour combinations so the team could work with confidence. Component states including focus, hover, error, and disabled were designed to be visually distinct and keyboard accessible, supporting every user navigating complex insurance content regardless of how they access it.
Within the design team, the system removed a significant amount of day-to-day friction. Designers were no longer choosing between conflicting approaches or rebuilding components from scratch. New team members could get up to speed and start contributing to live features faster than before. For the broader organisation, it meant a consistent experience across every digital touchpoint and a system built to grow with the business.
A good design system does more than keep things consistent. It gives your team confidence and cuts the time spent making the same decisions twice. If you're working in healthcare or any sector where accessibility is non-negotiable, let's build something that works for your team and the people they serve.
