The Client

Veon is the world’s 7th biggest telecommunication company, with brands that reach 10% of the global population. The business serves 235 million customers across 12 countries as diverse as Italy, Russia, Egypt and Pakistan.

The company is transforming around a new vision to bring best in class digital experiences to hundreds of millions of its customers. It has ambition to rival services like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp expand in to other online services.

The Veon app is first step on the company’s transformation. It offers social messaging and calls free of data and network charges. With offer of unlimited usage Veon aims to gain place in customers “digital service stack” and later expand with more services.

Design for scale is a challenge

The design of the Veon app was conceived as a system at the start of the project. But over time, as the product evolved and design team scaled, inconsistency and fragmentation emerged. Soon it started impacting both the user experience and development time.

The problem was there was on one in charge of maintaining and updating the original system. Each product team only focused on evolving part of the platform. It became clear that role of permanent system designer was needed.

What I did

It became my full time job to focus on the design system. Now my task was to find better ways to make it more intuitive and flexible, promote design system adoption, and prevent non systematic design creep.

I set out to improve the system and its documentation and make it as easy to use as possible. The plan was to use federated model of management to enable designers from various teams to contribute to the maintenance of system.