System context
PhysicsX is an AI-driven engineering platform supporting complex simulation and optimisation workflows across multiple product surfaces. As the platform evolved, the challenge was not only designing individual interfaces, but introducing greater structure across themes, components, and design–engineering workflows.
The work extends beyond screen-level design into system foundations: creating more consistent patterns, supporting scalable theming, and strengthening the contract between design and frontend implementation.
My role
I operate across product design, design systems, and design–engineering alignment, focusing on structuring platform UX, evolving the design system, and improving how design decisions propagate into implementation. This includes defining reusable patterns, supporting theming, and exploring AI-assisted prototyping workflows.
Outcome
- Introduced clearer system foundations for theming and semantic design tokens.
- Improved consistency across product surfaces through reusable patterns and shared rules.
- Reduced ambiguity between design and engineering through improved system contracts.
- Explored new design-to-code workflows to support faster iteration.
Overview
The platform spans multiple applications and workflows for engineering. As these product areas evolve, inconsistencies have appeared in how components, themes, and layout patterns come together.
A large part of the challenge is organisational as well as visual: ensuring that design system work remains grounded in real implementation, and that frontend teams have clearer entry points into the system.
Design ↔ engineering alignment
- Work directly with frontend engineers to define how design tokens and component decisions should map into implementation.
- Document clearer relationships between different parts of the system (design system assets, frontend libraries, and consuming applications).
- Validate design decisions against real product scenarios rather than treating the system as an isolated library.
Design system and theming
A major focus has been evolving the design system into a more semantic and scalable foundation, including support for new theming, and clearer token roles across surfaces, borders, and states.
- Introduced semantic tokens and colour structures to better support theming.
- Defined clearer roles for surfaces, text, borders, and control states.
- Developed patterns intended to reduce duplication and improve implementation consistency.
This work shifts the system away from one-off visual decisions towards a more durable structure that supports multiple teams and evolving product needs.
Structuring complex product areas
I design tooling for engineers operating in highly technical domains. Many product workflows involve dense information, technical controls, and multi-step interactions. The design challenge is to improve clarity and reduce cognitive load without removing the depth required by specialist users.
- Defining structural patterns for layout, data organisation, and page roles.
- Exploring how archetypes and shared interaction rules could support more consistent UX decisions.
- Focusing on balancing precision and usability across technically demanding contexts.
AI-assisted prototyping
In parallel, I am exploring AI-assisted prototyping workflows to connect design, code, and documentation more directly. The goal is not simply generating UI quickly, but grounding outputs in real system components and design tokens.
- Explore how component implementations can be interrogated and mapped back to design system rules.
- Use AI-assisted workflows to prototype interfaces closer to reality.
- Investigate ways to reduce the gap between design intent and frontend implementation.
This work sits at the boundary between design and frontend, helping to test a more continuous workflow, rather than relying on a design hand-off that frontend teams pick up.
Adoption challenges
One of the more important discoveries is that system quality alone does not guarantee adoption. Different customer contexts, frontend capability levels, and time pressures all influence whether teams use shared patterns or revert to one-off solutions.
- Identify friction points between design system intent and implementation reality.
- Explore earlier intervention points in projects to audit usage, and propose improvements.
- Focus on improving the entry point into the system, not just the system itself.
Approach
- Operating across design, frontend, and product rather than treating them as separate disciplines.
- Validating decisions against real interfaces and implementation constraints.
- Balancing long-term system quality with practical customer needs.
- Focusing on clarity, consistency, and scalability over short-term visual fixes.
Closing
This work centred on introducing stronger system foundations into a complex and evolving product. The primary impact was not only improving individual UI areas, but helping design and engineering operate against a more shared structure – through better tokens, clearer patterns, and more direct alignment with implementation.