Client
Department of Health, Disability & Ageing (DHDA)
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Duration
2 years
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Year
2024-2026
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Role
Product Design & DesignOps lead
120
Users
100+
Components
4
Platforms
Project Story
Ever watched The Walking Dead or any chaotic CW show?
What better way to narrate how I evolved this DS then to compare it to some of our favourite series’. It’s the closest reference point for how I experienced the Aged Care Design System. It unfolded in seasons. New characters arrived, others dropped off, tensions built behind the scenes, priorities shifted, and every so often there was a small win that felt like a season finale.
My work on the ACDS spanned two years. I joined when it was still finding its feet beyond proof of concept and stayed as it grew into something the department needed to trust, use, and scale. The ACDS sits within the HCD section of the DSAI branch within DHDA, and over time my role grew with it, from icon grunt work and production support to Figma administration, governance strategies, system optimisations and supporting adjacent design systems across the department.
Each “season” I’m about to narrate took more or less around a quarter, none of this was planned. My role was to be a design system designer, and I took it from there.
Season 1
Managing icons and learning the ecosystem
When I first joined the Aged Care Design System, I came in through two practical areas of work. One was supporting the .NET side of the system, which meant helping maintain one of the design system’s platform outputs. The other was owning the icon library, where I was responsible for creating, formatting, publishing, maintaining, and responding to requests from a growing internal user base.
It was not the glamorous side of design systems. It was the backstage work that kept things usable and moving. Through that work, I started to understand how the system was structured, who relied on it, and what it took to keep shared assets consistent across teams.
By the end of this chapter, a bigger issue had started to show itself. The challenge was no longer just making and maintaining assets. It was that many teams still did not have a clear way to discover, understand, and confidently use the system. That became the cliffhanger leading into the next season.
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Arc
Rookie Arc
The Aged Care Design System had just lifted off from it’s POC days, with 1 parent Figma library and 4 child libraries to adhere to each platform
Character development
Designing, creating and publishing icons as part of the ACDS Icon library. Designing alert, badges and header patterns for .NET platform
Season finale
Whilst the ACDS Design team expanded and had things to maintain, it did not just need more assets but a front door.
Season 2
Designing the front door to the design system
By this point, the problem had grown beyond maintaining files and assets. The ACDS had useful foundations, but it still lacked a clear identity, stronger narrative, and a central place where teams could understand what it was, how it worked, and why it mattered.
I teamed up with another designer (Alice!!) to tackle that problem together as adoption and communicating this amazing system felt neccessary. Using Figma, we explored layouts, interactions, and information architecture for a SharePoint site designed to behave more like a design system website, studying systems like IBM, Atlassian, SLDS, and GEL to understand how mature systems build trust, structure content, and support adoption.
The outcome was more than a documentation layer. It became a clearer front door into the ACDS, bringing together foundational assets, onboarding guidance, collaboration practices, request pathways, and shortcuts into Figma so teams could discover, understand, and use the system more confidently.
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Arc
Identity and adoption
The ACDS had substance, but not enough story around it, so we set out to turn a scattered set of resources into a clearer, more credible brand
Character development
Communication and contnet design of SharePoint experience, shaping its layout, interaction model, information architecture, and overall narrative so the website felt easier to discover, understand, and adopt.
Season finale
We successfully launched the SharePoint, with over 200 page views and the Get Started onboarding pages for designers emerging as the most visited area, showing that teams were actively using it as their entry point into the ACDS.
Season 3
Maturing the system with design tokens and DesignOps
With the SharePoint now live, my role widened and I took on more responsibility for administering and growing the site, while also moving deeper into the Figma environment itself through design ops and foundational system work.
I saved the department $84,900 USD quarterly in Figma licensing costs by helping rationalise seat usage across the department, distinguishing where full design access was truly needed versus where view or comment access made more sense, and reducing unnecessary spend without disrupting active teams. I built a spreadsheet model to identify gaps in usages to forecast the volume we required.
The main arc of the season, though, was design tokens. I wanted the system to evolve, so I drove the expansion of our token structure in Figma, moving it from a limited setup into a more comprehensive hierarchy covering colour, spacing, borders, and typography. That work made the ACDS stronger at its core, improved consistency across teams and platforms, and laid the groundwork for better handoff between design and development.
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Arc
Scale up and out
My role stretched across three muscles at once: operational ownership, tooling intelligence, and foundational system design.
Character development
Administered and grew the SharePoint, improved Figma license management across the department, and created token taxonomy. Involved developers and collaborated with QA to target foundations that suffered from inconsistencies such as spacing.
Season finale
The design system had become much stronger in Figma, but that progress also exposed a new tension... as the design side matured, the challenge of keeping design and development aligned became harder to ignore.
Season 4
Driving clarity through design system versioning
Once the token foundations were in place, the next challenge was not just making the ACDS stronger, but making its evolution easier to follow.
I led versioning across the ACDS files introducing clearer release conventions, freezes, change logs, and semantic versioning so updates had structure, rationale, and traceability. This became increasingly important as the Salesforce stream grew in prominence and more teams relied on the library to design and build with confidence.
This season also brought new cast members to the front including our consumers. At this point, the work was less about producing isolated assets and more about helping the system evolve in a way other teams could actually follow, absorb, and trust.
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Arc
Release management
The principles of the design system started to shift, becoming more consumer centric rather than optimising how we managed it
Character development
Building flows, diagrams, aligning project schedules and engaging with cross-team stakeholders like across delivery chain. Presenting and facilitating workshops and discussions.
Season finale
Versioning had been fully introduced into Figma, giving the Salesforce stream a more predictable release rhythm and giving consumer teams a clearer way to absorb updates from the ACDS library into their own files.
Season 5
Confronting drift and governing the system
By now, the ACDS looked mature on the surface. Versioning was in place, token work had wrapped, and the Salesforce stream had become the centre of gravity. But stronger foundations in Figma did not automatically mean the whole machine was aligned. The pressure points building across earlier seasons finally came to a stop here... we had to properly understand where design and code packages (developed by our friends at SPET) were drifting, and get the right people into the same room to deal with it.
We conducted a major audit of the design system to uncover those gaps. I built a spreadsheet-based component health tracker that made drift visible, discussable, and harder to ignore. This was the season where the system had to answer for itself.
I introduced more practical ways of tightening how the system operated across teams: workshops on Figma capabilities, using checklist widgets before handoff, branching workflows, and weekly forums between the design system crew, QA, and our consumer teams. The work was no longer just about building the system well. It was about making sure it stayed aligned, understood, and accountable as it scaled.
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Arc
Governance
We’re now not just building the system, but checking whether it was truly in sync
My role
Inspecting designs, building and reformatting components to match their code counterpart. Continuous workshops and discussions. Managing a component tracker.
Season finale
ACDS felt far more grown up, the system now had clearer rituals, better visibility, and stronger mechanisms for staying aligned as it evolved. The audit was far from complete, but we learnt that transparency led to better trust and adoption of our assets.
Season 6
Flying solo
After helping the ACDS reach a more mature state, I stepped away from the main set for a while. This was my roaming specialist season. I took on work outside the core ACDS storyline, leading the EIAMS MFA uplift and later jumping into a rapid discovery project for MPS/NATSIFAC program, where I helped shape a calculator and dashboard concept as the product design hitman brought in to solve the problem fast. Both these products did fall under the ACDS, thus I was looking at the design system just from the bottom up
Even while off the main ACDS stage, I never fully left the ecosystem. I continued monitoring the Health Figma enterprise as an admin across billing, users, and workspaces, while also consulting with the Health design system team as they began setting up their own libraries. It was a different kind of season, less about evolving one system directly and more about proving that the same systems thinking could travel across projects, teams, and product contexts.
Day-to-day design system work was carried out by my team of designers, from audit follow-through and component state behaviour uplifts to alignment meetings and the regular work of keeping the library moving. By the time I returned for one last stint, the show had kept running, but the world I helped shape was still very much in motion.
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Arc
Specialist designer
Whilst keeping my enterprise Figma admin reigns I did some field work, user research and prototyping where other sections needed it most.
My services
User testing, research synthesis, building interactive prototypes, journey maps, user personas.
Checkout my MFA UX Uplift case study!
Season finale
I returned to the ACDS Core team more formally for one last stint, bringing back broader perspective, sharper ACDS product instincts, and proof that the work could hold up well beyond its original set.
Final season
Leaving a secure legacy
My final stint stopped being about maintaining the library itself and started focusing on the environment around it: the Figma setup, the security constraints, and the tooling conditions that would shape what the next era of the system could become.
While the usual ACDS conversations were still running, like improving how consumers were updated on change and aligning release conventions for components, I started pushing on the bigger layer above it all. I connected with Figma AU, worked through long-running security and platform constraints, and helped move forward conversations around SIEM integration, file classification, policy maturity, desktop app access, plugins, widgets, and AI-related capability.
In this part of the department, the thing that matters most is delivery efficiency. That meant the future of ACDS was not just a better library, but a better engine for design-to-development workflows. The seeds I started planting here were aimed at what comes next... An AI-enabled design system by connecting our ACDS libraries to Figma Make, enabling Code Connect and MCP-style workflows, and improving AI-assisted development with SPET and other downstream teams.
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Arc
Empowering design system environments
Grow your network, you never know who you might bump into
My services
Figma make, Code connect, Codex, facilitating conversations and workshops. Running technical security checks and managing tooling of Figma
Series finale
Saying my goodbyes to a 2 year journey was difficult. I had nurtured and evolved this product beyond my wildest expectations and was looking forward to the next opportunity I get to work with a Design System
PayPal
2024
Site Design
Ticketmaster
2024
Site Design + Design System
Enhanced Games
2024
Brand Identity
American Airlines
2023
Site Design
United Minds
2023
Site Design + Brand Identity
Four Hands
2022
Site Design + Design System
Post credit scene
Stuck back like a true marvel fan? There’s a lot I’ve taken away from my responsibilities at the Aged Care Design System, but most of all I’ve had fun working on this side of Product Design. The system grew up, and so did my role in it.