Oscar builds digital tools for a range of users, including members, providers, brokers, employers, and a wide array of Oscar employees. Designing all of these digital experiences in parallel, with a small team, has been challenging. Our continued investment in our design system, Anatomy, has helped us rise to meet these challenges. For those not familiar, a design system defines a brand’s core UI/UX. This includes everything from typography, to form fields, to entire page layouts.

We based our approach on Atomic Design, a principle that describes the smallest of UI elements or components as atoms (e.g., text, color, or spacing) and increasingly larger components as molecules composed of atoms (e.g., a text input, a button, or a modal). The idea is that as an atomic design system develops, it will lead to increasingly more complex and grouped components (organisms), and eventually to entire layouts, pages, or templates.

Since starting work on Anatomy in 2016, the design team has implemented the system in nearly every web experience Oscar has created since. Over the past two years we’ve learned a few lessons on how to successfully communicate, create, and organize a team to build a design system.