Project Description

Amor Components

Signet Jewelers — April 2022

Responsibilities

Visual Design, Design System, CMS Design, Documentation

Team

Adam Bitner, CD
Erika Nelson, UXD
Arjen De Klerk, SWE
Vinay Bulsu, PM

Timeline

2 Months

Overview

Amor is a design system built to ensure uniform and accessible e-commerce experiences on a large scale across multiple Signet brands. While it worked well for our shop and checkout experiences, its implementation wasn’t as successful for the content pages managed by our marketing teams.My role involved in developing a set of reusable content components in Figma and Hybris (our CMS) that encompassed marketing materials with supporting documentation, leveraging the visual language established in the Amor design system.

The redesigned CMS tool, improved the efficiency of our marketing team’s content management processes, currently with over 1,000 components in use across our websites.

1.0  The speed of creating marketing properties with Amor Content Components

Leveraging our Design System

An audit of Signet’s content pages was necessary from both design and engineering perspective. We used 68 different fonts and 41 colors across five websites at the time, which was a severe performance concern.

When building the new components, I started to standardize our use of color and typography, extending the visual language defined in our design system. This effort helped content authors create new marketing material at velocity and maintain a consistent brand experience.

2.0  Amor Design Tokens used in components —brand colors, typography, and buttons

Component Types

Documenting content patterns found across hundreds of pages helped define the scope for the initial batch of components. The new components standardized the most commonly used content patterns and provided better guidance based on the intent behind adding content. These components set the groundwork for creating page templates.

Individual brand expression is implemented in each component via typography, language, color, and imagery.

3.1  Some of the new component types — hero banner, layout, carousel, video

3.2  Hero Banner brand variations for Kay, Jared, Zales, and Banter

Responsive Design

One of the marketing team’s biggest pain points was ensuring the page designs were displaying correctly on all devices. In the past, content authors designed adaptive pages relying primarily on CSS media queries, requiring a separate desktop and mobile code. The new components eliminated the struggle of developing for different devices by having a pre-defined responsive behavior.

4.0  Responsive behavior of a Hero Banner component

Dynamic Properties

Dynamic properties offer flexibility within a system. Content authors can choose different properties within a component or toggle elements on and off. This functionality was embedded both within Figma and Hybris, helping us maintain simplicity and clear content hierarchy.

5.0  Dynamic properties in Figma influencing a Hero Banner component.

Component Documentation

Collaborating with developers, I created detailed documentation for each component around its typography, spacing, colors, dimensions, and character limits. Keyboard navigation for carousels, header hierarchy, and a space to add alt text in Hybris were also part of the considerations for accessible design.

Specifications on usage and examples helped designers and the marketing team understand how to start using components. Amor Content Components are a part of our Figma library, and anyone can access their documentation in ZeroHeight.

6.1  Part of the component documentation on typography, character limits, and optional elements.

6.2  Part of the component documentation on spacing, dimensions, and scaling.

Empowering Contributors

Design Systems are only successful when they can be easily used by anyone working on the product.

For this project, I partnered with our design system team to develop guidelines and training materials tailored to user types and knowledge levels, advocating for the adoption, maintenance, and upkeep of components and documentation. We developed an intake process to submit new component requests or updates to support contributions from our designers and marketing teams.

Amor Content Components have empowered everyone in the organization to launch new marketing pages rapidly and consistently, improving our website’s interface with confidence.

POSITION
Senior Designer

COMPANY
Signet Jewelers

YEAR
2022

RESPONSIBILITIES
Visual Design
Design Systems
Documentation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Kudos to Adam, Erika, and Jen for all their help and direction.