CSX Design System
A modern design system to support dozens of applications and keep digital production teams on the right track?
Chugga chugga choo choo.
The Problem
CSX, a national leader in rail-based transportation and logistics, manages 100+ internal- and customer-facing digital applications. Siloed development efforts, mismatched designs and UI components, and lack of centralized documentation made it challenging to maintain a consistent brand experience and UX integrity at scale.
The Task
CSX recognized an immediate opportunity to drive operational efficiency across its product design and development teams and engaged Crux Digital to evolve its design system and implement a sophisticated product strategy to drive widespread organizational usage and adoption.
The Solution
In a matter of months, we helped CSX evolve their design system from a concept into an enterprise-level product built for scalability and cross-functional collaboration.
Technically Speaking
We preserved and standardized the existing CSX design library while implementing an elegant system architecture that can easily support complex custom components as user needs and product development evolve.
We established two custom PrimeNG themes for use with both internal and customer-facing products, resolving past inconsistency between design files in Figma and implementation in multiple versions of Angular and PrimeNG.
The design system drives developer efficiency and experience consistency across large, widely-distributed teams by leveraging consistent naming conventions and mapping design tokens to theme variables.
Our product development process includes robust documentation and usage guidelines with additional self-documenting features to streamline future updates.
We leveraged our partnership with Knapsack to provide a workspace where design files and code components are connected, documented, and dynamically maintained for reference by designers and developers alike.
The Outcome
CSX serves two-thirds of the US population and has over 20,000 employees—it will always face ongoing need to ensure efficient digital production processes. This modern design system increases speed to market across CSX’s digital products now, and lays the necessary tracks to support efficient growth and expansion in the future.
Our approach to product development prioritizes the cross-functional value of design systems to ensure usability and adoption. We worked with leaders and individual contributors across design and development teams throughout the organization to foster better collaboration, improve workflows, and cut down on replicated efforts.
