Stantec Basin Design System
A product design system that modernized highly technical professional apps and was adopted for every product in development across Stantec.
Stantec.io was a young division within Stantec’s innovation office, building new digital products for Stantec’s own experts and for sale to clients outside the company. The products were highly technical, built for data scientists, geologists, consultants, business analysts, engineers and architects doing complex, specialized work, so the UI and UX had to be intuitive enough for those users to work effectively in their jobs.
Professional tools like these have historically been clunky and visually dated, closer to something a developer might have put together in the 1990s than to modern software. A second goal was to modernize them, giving expert users apps that look and feel as good as the consumer products they use every day. That called for a consistent design foundation, and the existing design system was a basic first version.
I started by talking with the experts to understand what they needed from these products and how they use them. Then, with two product designers, I expanded and evolved the system into Basin 2.1, a design, component and class library covering typography, colour, grid, forms, navigation, tables, calendars and data visualization. We used it to design a suite of products, including Altitude, PipeWATCH, Dam Insights, Flood Predictor, DebrisFlow Predictor, TransAlta and the Financial Analysis & Management System (FAMS).
Result: Basin has been adopted as the design system for all products being developed across Stantec. The Altitude suite was piloted by Stantec experts and was very well received: they now had modern tools that saved them time in their workflows.
Products designed with Basin, including the Altitude launcher, PipeWATCH, flood prediction and financial dashboards.
Studio: Stantec