Design foundations

Rightmove had always been a web first platform, and while there are many teams dedicated to designing the website. There’s only one team that's focused on the app.

When I joined, that team was very much delivery focused. The priority was to reach parity of features with the site, what led to copy-pasting website designs into the app, and not designing from an app-first perspective.

There was no focus on product discovery, user research or design ceremonies. And as the designs where inherited from different teams, there was no consistency across screens. Each feature would have its own style, use different layouts and components.

We started running regular design sessions with everyone in the team. The topics varied from ideation workshops, sharing research findings, coming up with assumptions to test, mapping out user flows or just check ins to share design progress.

This helped the engineering team be involved in evert stage of the design, with plenty of opportunities to raise concerns or give feedback. And it helped me understand what scenarios I often fail to consider and how the front-end and backend systems work.

Design is more than figma files, is about how we work. So a vital part of creating our design foundations was to set up processes for research.

We started using usertesting.com, doing 3 to 4 tests per months. What gave us the ground to propose improvements, and start making features app-specific.

Now we were taking a proactive approach towards design, challenging and proposing solutions tailored to the app. We documented all our insights and decisions in a confluence folder accessible to all teams. We were breaking silos and quickly became the go-to team for user research.

Some files had screenshots of the app, some had designs that were never implemented, and most were about specific features that were different to what was live.

So I worked in recreating the entire app in figma, one file per screen. I then created a file where I saved all components, so rather than have components around different pages they all lived in the same place.

This way the files starting evolving with the app, always showing the latest version. And that file with all the components was the beginning of our ‘Design System’ .

Once we had established our design system basics in Figma, we worked together towards bringing those into the apps, standardising colours, fonts and buttons across ios and Android.

This is an ongoing process that took many months, but today there almost no screens that are not built with reusable components and our design system is becoming more and more robust.

Having these modules made developing much easier for the team in terms of coding and testing, and it has also helped with design consistency across the apps.