Ansys Design System
When we released the first version of Ansys Discovery, we immediately felt the energy around it. Internally and externally, people were excited — not just because it was a new product, but because it looked and felt different from anything else in the Ansys portfolio. It had a modern visual language, a more intuitive workflow, and a level of polish that stood out.
That excitement quickly turned into momentum. Other product teams began asking how they could bring the same experience to their own applications. At the same time, company leadership elevated User Experience as a core pillar of product development, emphasizing that consistency across the portfolio was no longer a “nice to have” — it was essential. All of this set the stage for a new chapter: defining a unified design system for the company.
My team had experimented with earlier versions of a design system, but this time the intent was different. There was real appetite for a single source of truth — something that could guide product teams across the organization. We built on what we had learned from Discovery, evolving the system into a set of UI controls, patterns, principles, and visual foundations that reflected the best of what we had created.
Leading up to the release of the first official version in late 2021, I wrote significant portions of the system’s documentation, including the UI design guidelines, interaction patterns, and visual specifications for our common controls. We also recognized the realities of our product ecosystem, so we created multiple paths for teams to adopt the system — including using the UI framework my team built (with many pieces I personally contributed) as the foundation for their applications.
In 2022, Ansys acquired OnScale, a company with deep expertise in browser‑native simulation tools. This acquisition accelerated our shift toward web‑based products and created the need for a new version of the design system — one that could support both desktop and web platforms with equal clarity. Around the same time, the company committed to adopting Figma more broadly, which gave us the opportunity to rebuild the design system directly in Figma and establish it as the single source of truth for all designers.
The acquisition also kicked off an effort to consolidate the various web UI frameworks into a smaller, more unified set that aligned closely with the design system — similar to what we had already done for the desktop framework. I led a virtual team to define the architecture for how the Figma design system would stay in sync with the downstream UI frameworks for both web and desktop. Our goal was to minimize manual work, reduce drift, and ensure that updates to the design system flowed naturally into the tools teams used to build their products.
By the end of 2025 and into early 2026, more than 80 products across the company were implementing the design system, with over 30 using the web and desktop UI frameworks as their foundation. Seeing that level of adoption — and knowing how many teams were able to move faster and build more consistent experiences because of the system — has been one of the most rewarding parts of my career.
