Audit the existing experience.
Identify repeated patterns, inconsistencies, and product-specific needs across the portfolio.
Selected work
Consistency is
Atlas Design System
Consistency is
a team capability.
Building a shared design foundation across travel products–and making it useful to the people who design and ship them.
- Organization
- Alibaba Travels
- Period
- 2019–2024
- My responsibility
- Design Director · Later also Chief Experience Officer
Shared design foundations
Typography. Language. Accessibility.
01
Foundations
Tokens, typography, visual standards
02
Patterns
Reusable components and interactions
03
Products
Distinct journeys, a coherent experience
+52%
conversion following rollout
−60%
design-cycle time
−40%
engineering implementation effort
These figures summarize documented outcomes from specific rollout and implementation comparisons. They are not presented as one controlled experiment or as effects caused by the design system alone.
The challenge
Different journeys.
Different journeys.
Repeated decisions.
Flights, hotels, tours, insurance, trains, and buses each have their own requirements. As those products evolve independently, the same design decisions get made repeatedly–and the customer experience becomes fragmented.
Atlas gave teams a common starting point while preserving the distinctions that matter in each travel journey.
My contribution
Build the system.
Build the system.
Build the way it works.
I built and scaled Atlas as Design Director, working across design, engineering, and product. My remit included shared foundations, adoption, standards, and the operating practices needed to maintain the system.
Make the foundations explicit.
Establish reusable components, shared tokens, and interaction patterns. Bring accessibility, right-to-left language needs, and performance into the decisions.
Make adoption part of the work.
Use documentation, governance, and contribution practices to help teams use and evolve the system.
The trade-off
Shared does not
Shared does not
mean identical.
The goal is a consistent experience–not a rule that every product must behave the same way.
A shared system needs room for the context of a particular journey. Governance helps teams distinguish a useful variation from avoidable inconsistency, and gives improvements a route back into the common foundation.
The lasting value of Atlas is the connection between customer experience and delivery: teams can spend less time repeating established decisions and more time solving the problems specific to their product.
The lesson was organizational as much as visual: a library creates leverage only when teams understand when to reuse, when to contribute, and who is responsible for the system after launch.