Wise Design

Wise specializes in cross-border payment transfer. As of 2023, it offers three main products: Wise Account, Wise Business, and Wise Platform.

Design System Name

• Wise Design

Design System team size

• More than 10

Design System team make-up

• Designers
• Engineers
• Brand
• Program manager
• Researcher

Governance model

• Centralized

Products/brands covered by the design system

• More than 10

Adoption approach and means

Typically at Wise, teams will release asynchronously — that’s because we have more than 90 teams simultaneously working on different parts of the product. For our design system and brand refresh rollout, we needed to release all changes simultaneously. 

This presented the challenge of communicating with all of those teams to ensure that they bought into our vision and aligning with the design system. Autonomous teams are empowered to make the decisions that will provide the most impact for our customers. And so we had to convince them that aligning with the design system in order to make the brand refresh a success would be the optimal project into which to focus their energy. 

We leveraged our March 2023 brand refresh as an opportunity to engage with teams across Wise. Rather than have teams adopt the design system incrementally, as we previously had done, adoption of the design system became a key component of the brand refresh. We audited the entirety of our product to identify where the design system wasn’t already in use. And we used that information to work in tandem with the product teams across Wise to ensure widespread adoption of Wise Design. The success of this was reflected, when 6 weeks before we released the brand refresh and new design system, we decided to update our logo. Despite the short timeframe, widespread adoption of the design system ensured that it was completed with no interruption to our expected rollout dates.

We spent a large amount of time communicating across Wise in order to promote adoption of the design system. We did this both on a company-wide as well as team level. Our communications both outlined the benefits that teams could expect upon adopting the design system – greater consistency across our product, accessibility improvements and an increase in efficiency for both designing and implementing new products and product changes. We also spent time with stakeholders in order to ensure they were aware of the benefits, both immediate and future, of adopting the design system where it hadn’t been done to date.

Adoption lifecycle management

We considered the design system adoption got effective with our brand refresh release. We could see that our drive for design system adoption had led to greater consistency and accessibility throughout Wise. Even though we had made a decision to update the Wise logo 6 weeks from release, the widespread adoption of the design system meant that there was no negative impact on our release dates. And as time progresses, we can see that changes to the design system are adopted quickly and efficiently.

Running design week for designers throughout Wise was instrumental in encouraging teams to feel empowered to drive the adopTracking the progress of teams in one place meant that we were able to identify where teams were blocked. And creating weekly check ins sped up the process of identifying any blockers that existed.

At the beginning of our drive to increase design system adoption, we had expected that teams would be able to complete the work without needing additional input or resources from the design system team. However, we saw feedback coming from guilds and teams that they needed further help and so we pivoted our approach. The design system team took on the task of project managing over 50 different product teams. And we embedded design system designers and engineers in the teams where we saw it would accelerate adoption and unblock implementation.

Adoption results

We’ve learned that while working in autonomous teams comes with difficulty, if you can communicate well, it does in fact lead to greater innovation. And that open communication also allowed us to identify any issues early.

We have seen the framework that we have used for the release of the design system be replicated for following projects – both for releasing dark mode on web and for accessibility improvements.

As a result, the Wise Design documentation site received more than half a million views less than 2 weeks post launch.