Building the Design System That Gave Jio's Designers Back Half Their Week
I led design for Jio's most-replicated post-order flow, turning a fragmented, copy-paste design process into a modular pattern library and cutting designer time on these flows by 53%.
Client
Jio
Year
2022
Services
Design Systems · B2B
Role
Senior Product Designer. I led the research, design, and testing for the order flow.
The Problem
Jio has one of India's biggest product families. Many brands, apps, and a B2B business, all on different platforms. As it grew, designers on every team kept rebuilding the same screens for each brand. Nothing was shared. Nothing was written down.
This wasted weeks of work every few months. It made Jio's apps look different from each other. And the whole design process was too shaky to grow.
I was asked to lead the design of the order flow, the cancel, return, and order-status screens. These were the most complex screens, and the ones designers copied most often. This is the part I owned from start to finish, and the part I'll walk through below.
Note: This was an internal tool, so it isn't public. Everything below covers the full project.
What I Did
On a team of four, I ran the order-flow work end to end:
Research: I turned what we learned from interviews and other design systems into a clear direction.
Design: I designed the components and worked out how they'd flex across brands and platforms.
Testing: I planned and ran tests with 17+ designers, the people who'd actually use the system.
Working with others: I stayed close to product managers, business teams, and engineers so the work was doable and fit every brand.
Note: When this page says "I," it's work I did myself. When it says "we," it was shared teamwork.
How I Approached It
I treated Jio's own designers as the users, because for an internal tool, they are. I looked at other strong design systems, mapped every screen Jio already had, and talked to designers who felt the problem every day. Three things stood out:
Too much rebuilding: The same screens, made from scratch, for every brand. Weeks wasted.
Too much inconsistency: No shared rules, so every app looked a little different.
Too slow: Building by hand was slow and error-prone, resulting in delayed releases.
Note: When this page says "I," it's work I did myself. When it says "we," it was shared teamwork.
What I Built
The result was one shared library sorted by brand, screen type, and style, with clear rules for how to use each part. For the order flow, it included:
Order & status cards: flexible cards that designers could set up for any need.
Item selection: lets users pick which items to return or cancel, so they always know what they're choosing.
Reason selection: a set of options that cover every reason someone might cancel or return, across all products.
Quantity & summary screens: clear confirm screens that cut mistakes before the user hits submit.
Cancel summary: clear refund and policy info so people trust the last step.
The Big Decision
The hardest choice wasn't about how things looked. It was about how the system was built. A design system for one brand can be strict. But this one had to work for all of Jio's brands. If it was too strict, teams would just ignore it the first time it didn't fit their brand. So I built the components to be flexible, not fixed. A designer on any brand could adjust a pattern to fit their needs instead of copying and changing it. The downside: more work upfront, and harder for engineers to build. But it was the only way people would actually keep using it. I checked this was the right call by testing with 17+ designers before we asked engineers to build anything.
The Results
53% less time spent by designers on these flows. That's half a week back, per designer, for real product work instead of rebuilding.
20+ reusable patterns, live on mobile and desktop.
7+ designers tested the system before we built it, so it wouldn't flop on launch.
What I Learned
Designing for designers takes just as much care as designing for regular users. I had to understand how they work and how they think, then build something flexible enough for a complex, multi-brand company — without feeling limiting. It reminded me that internal tools can create just as much value as flashy customer apps. They just don't get to hide behind a pretty screen.
What Came Next
The library was built to grow: agreeing on how teams govern it, connecting it to engineering, and adding analytics to keep measuring its impact over time.
“I’ve worked with many designers before, but this experience was on another level. The attention to detail and thoughtful approach made the process smooth and enjoyable.”
Nirmal Biswas
Associate Design Director
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