Empowering Corporate Creativity through Design Harmony
Dealer Inspire has been addressing dealer challenges since 2016, offering chat products, streamlined purchasing transactions, and reporting platforms to enhance efficiency for both dealers and manufacturers.
While these solutions were introduced at different times, each with its own UI style guide, this approach prioritized speed. However, the time has come to establish a unified design system to harmonize our platform products.
Client
Cars.com
DealerInspire.com
Year
2019-2021
Category
Design Library
Type of Work
Discovery
Planning
Develop
Deploy
The Challenge
The challenge at hand was to develop solutions compatible with both native and web applications while navigating constraints imposed by earlier adaptations. Complicating matters further, we found ourselves managing five distinct libraries, each lacking comprehensive documentation on usage.
Over time, this lack of clarity led to numerous stakeholders contributing to the project, resulting in a crowded development landscape.



Growing Pains and Early Adaption
The most significant challenge we faced was the rapid growth of CARS/Dealer Inspire. We expanded so quickly that we often neglected to revisit and refine the foundational elements that were always in our minds.
#1 Multiple design systems
​#2 No unity with tools
​#3 Dev friction
#4 No collaboration
Our Process

Design Audit
Dive deep into your design assets, identify strengths, and uncover areas for enhancement.

Planned for Scalability
Dealer Inspire boasted a robust design department encompassing various branches, including product, web, cars, features, and OEM.

Planned Everything
Leveraging Jira proved instrumental in orchestrating our team efforts to propel forward our design layout.
The Design System
Design Principles
Foundational guidelines directing design decisions and maintaining consistency.
Mastering Components/Elements
Reusable elements such as buttons, forms, and icons, designed to maintain visual coherence across all products and platforms.
Utilizing Templates
Creating templates is a strategic move to expedite the design process while ensuring consistency and cohesion across projects. By establishing pre-designed frameworks, teams can swiftly translate ideas into tangible designs, reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks and minimizing the learning curve for new team members.