About the design system

Nord Design System is a collection of reusable components and tools, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build digital products and experiences.

The goal of Nord Design System is to improve UI consistency and quality, while making our software design and development processes more efficient. Nord also helps to establish a common vocabulary between everyone in our organization and ease collabo­ration between different teams and disciplines.

Nord Design System has a core team of designers and developers inside Nordhealth who are dedicated to building and supporting the system. The core team includes Joseph Anson and João Gonçalves.

Our documentation is public as it makes sharing and collaboration between different teams and third party vendors much easier as it increases the system’s visibility and accountability. This also makes us push towards higher quality and enables us to be more transparent. Finally, it also serves as an amazing tool that we can leverage in recruiting.

You can reach out to the team by heading over to our support page.

How we work

The following set of fundamental rules allows us to get to the highest level of productivity while benefiting both the company and our team members.

• We avoid meetings as much as possible. Instead of having them, we communicate asynchronous to each other via Linear, GitHub, Notion, Figma, and (occasionally) Slack, expecting responses within 24 hours.
• We don’t do team wide standups or sync meetings, except one meeting at the start of every cycle. Here we walk through the tasks and also discuss about how the team feels, what motivates them right now, and what would they want to change.
• Most collaboration and discussion happens in feedback loops, using the above mentioned tools, which requires clear and thoughtful communication from everyone.
• We don’t have strict deadlines. We ship incrementally as we move through the backlog and launch new things as they become ready.
• Our team members should be able to work on what they think is fun, or rely on their intuition when picking tasks from the backlog. Our roadmap on Linear holds us accountable.
• We focus on persistent iteration over flashy launches.

Our goals

Efficiency

Improved work efficiency for designers and developers.

Consistency

Improved user interface consistency and quality.

Openness

Improved communication between teams and people.

Standards

Shared guidelines and standards through documentation.