PUBLISHED DATE: 2025-08-14 03:52:58
Publicis Sapient
Experience Transformation: Design Systems
Offering Summary
Construct a central source of truth for your brand’s digital language to accelerate your product ecosystem. Create governance and harmonize across teams by providing consistent processes, tools, and reusable resources through the implementation of a Design System. Design Systems save time and money by eliminating redundancy and accelerating the ability to make changes at speed.
Solving Digital Transformation Challenges
The number of digital touchpoints has exploded, making the design ecosystem complex to manage efficiently and cost-effectively. With the expansion of today’s digital touchpoints comes increased complexity in managing your customer journey. In this ever-evolving landscape, it is paramount to design systems that can not only manage today’s complexities but also continue creating consistent and compelling experiences in anticipation of future needs.
Today, your teams may be faced with outdated processes that are unable to keep up with the velocity of required design work. As a result, work may be outsourced. Unfortunately, this is only a temporary solution—designers may enter and exit teams, creating waste, gaps, and fragmented designs over time. As a result, brand consistency can suffer and design optimization can be hindered, while costs to maintain are high.
Yet, in every challenge lies an opportunity:
- Trying to manage disparate content management systems—sometimes numbering in the dozens—along with kiosk platforms and dead internal sites is incredibly complex and expensive.
➔ Design Systems save time and money by eliminating code redundancy.
- Changing just one core piece of design or introducing just one piece of functionality that needs to flow through the complex ecosystem is unworkable if done manually.
➔ Design Systems integrate the ecosystem, accelerating the ability to make changes at speed.
- Your brand’s reputation is at risk from inconsistent design.
➔ The ability to make design changes quickly and easily—from the brand through to its sub-brands—safeguards brand reputation and customer experience.
Digital Experience Ecosystems
Design Systems help harmonize a variety of different brands, platforms, codebases, and digital products by:
- Integrating context (brand guidelines, experience principles, design language, and reusable elements) into the design thinking process
- Facilitating synchronization, enabling teams to communicate effectively, ensuring consistency and quality while minimizing redundancy, and empowering teams to focus on velocity
- Providing an open source that can be leveraged and contributed to by any stakeholder, team, resource, or vendor
Example Products:
- Mobile Apps
- eCommerce
- Marketing CMS
- DXP
- Internal Applications & Portals
Benefits of Design Systems:
- Consistent brand experiences: Delivering a consistent and familiar experience is essential for your customer experience and brand perception
- Workflow efficiency: Rapid collaboration with reusable resources for cross-functional teams and integration of design and development processes
- Increased process velocity: Accelerate the propagation of change throughout the design ecosystem
- Maintainability: Easily adopt, evolve, and maintain to ensure adoption and longevity
- Sustainability and extensibility: Support multiple purposes as a key driver
- Team cohesion: Improve communication and collaboration with a single source of truth
- Innovation and optimization accelerator: Enable teams to focus on optimization and innovation through rapid prototyping and testing
What Sets Publicis Sapient Apart?
With three decades of experience in digital business transformation excellence, we are experts in the field. Your dedicated Design Systems team engages with you as a partnership that endures over time—this is not a one-time fix. We partner with you to define consistent processes, tools, and reusable resources to transform your ability to effectively and efficiently execute digital design at scale across touchpoints.
Set your experience strategy up for success with Publicis Sapient’s full suite of Experience Transformation offerings:
- Customer Journey Transformation: Reinvent your customer journey and elevate experience for customers, prospects, employees, and partners
- Salesforce Experience Design: Connect the experiential and operational requirements essential to successfully implement your digital business transformation and maximize investment
- Connected Retail Store Experience: Drive real change in customer behavior by activating cohesive, frictionless customer experiences across your brand’s digital and physical channels
- Product Design Services: Design and deliver products that create the utmost value for your customers and deliver on brand promises
How We’ve Made an Impact
Luxury Luggage Brand
The imperative for change: With rising digital competitors, it was time for this high-end luggage retailer to take the first step in their digital transformation. Migration to an e-commerce platform presented the opportunity for the luxury retailer to reconceptualize a modern, best-in-class, and user-centric evolution of a digital flagship that fully expressed their luxury brand.
The transformative solution:
- Identified unique customer pain points when shopping for luggage and bags online
- Restructured navigation throughout while implementing thoughtful storytelling showcasing the quality, craft, and service of the brand
- Enhanced merchandising and social content that better highlighted the brand’s diverse products and collections
- Simplified monogramming, engraving, and checkout to increase the ease of product personalization and purchase
The business impact:
A faster, easier-to-use, and mobile-optimized shopping experience came to life that exemplifies the quality-focused and design-centric ethos of this beloved luxury brand. Moreover, with the branding codified into a digital design system, the business has the foundation to scale its brand ecosystem quickly and efficiently across additional customer touchpoints in future growth initiatives.
- +17% sales YoY using new platform
- +39% increase in traffic YoY
- +5% growth in new customers YoY
- Increase in units per transaction
Wawa
The imperative for change: As customer buying patterns and preferences changed, Wawa recognized the need to elevate their customer experience, enable new service models, and invest in foundational technologies to fuel future growth. They embarked on an ambitious digital transformation journey but ran into a variety of challenges, resulting in slower-than-expected velocity and results.
The transformative solution:
Wawa then partnered with Publicis Sapient to implement new processes and frameworks to accelerate value creation while simultaneously reducing program risk. New initiatives included:
- An experience strategy team to develop solutions for complex user experience problems earlier in the delivery process, leading to accelerated design sprints
- The development of reusable components and design standards that can be leveraged across applications and touchpoints
- The creation of a new frontend reference architecture to substantially improve developer efficiencies
The business impact:
Frameworks put in place have enabled Wawa to accelerate delivery of critical experiences and supporting foundational enablers, helping them to realize value and ROI more quickly.
- 50% reduction in design story points for complex CX features
- 25% improvement in front-end developer efficiency
- 90% reduction in the defect injection rate due to the simplified application architecture
- 30% improvement in overall delivery velocity
For more information, visit publicissapient.com/solutions/customer-experience-transformation.
Why Publicis Sapient
Publicis Sapient is a digital business transformation company. We partner with global organizations to help them create and sustain a competitive advantage in a world that is increasingly digital. We operate through our expert SPEED capabilities: Strategy and Consulting, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data, which, combined with our culture of curiosity and deep industry knowledge, enables us to deliver meaningful impact to our clients’ businesses through reimagining the products and experiences their customers truly value. Our agile, data-driven approach equips our clients’ businesses for change, making digital the core of how they think and what they do. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe with 20,000 people and over 50 offices worldwide. For more information, visit publicissapient.com.