Dayshape

Project overview

Project Name: Dayshape - AI-Powered Resource Management App

Platform: SaaS, B2B web application

Client/Industry: Talent management, Resource management sector for large businesses (Deloitte, Workday, Plante Moran, PWC ... and more)

Led the development of a scalable design system, improving consistency and enabling faster delivery across a growing product team, while supporting designers to establish effective design practices as the team scaled. Designed scheduling features using suitability scoring based on skills, availability, and contextual factors, reducing cognitive load in complex resource planning workflows. Influenced product direction toward decision-support models and lead accessibility adoption and testing across engineering and QA teams.

Challenges and solutions

Challenges

I joined the company with already built product and at that time, Dayshape was a small startup. I was impressed with how complex and smart the software was, but it was evident that the user experience wasn't lead by design. Over the years, the company has rapidly grown, and so has the product. The challenges that we faced were:

  • Outdated Bootstrap framework, Angular platform loosing support
  • Inconsistent front end, with duplicate unique components serving the same purpose, inline CSS styles
  • Non existent Design pattern library
  • Lack of processes
  • Churning many features very fast due to clients' high demands and the competitive market

Solutions

Over the 6 years with the company, the solutions had to be tailored to the most imminent problem we were solving. I summarized the journey in a chronological order:

  • First, we upgraded Bootstrap framework and established an icon library using Font Awesome
  • We started rewriting our front end from Angular to Vue.js. This gave us an opportunity to build a component library in Storybook.
  • Up until this point we heavily relied on Bootstrap's look and feel. We knew this was going to change when we decided to establish a company brand.
  • We built a UI Kit - component library in Figma. The kit catered to the old Bootstrap styles and our growing brand styles. This was a key strategy to support expanding design team and multiple front-end platforms in one application.
  • I educated the engineering and product teams about the importance of design processes and established planning design board in Jira which was then adopted by the wider product team.
  • I was an avid accessibility evangelist, and with a help of the QA team, I created processes to support accessibility testing and ensure compliance.