Badoo

Badoo was facing significant inconsistencies across its platforms due to outdated and fragmented design documentation. This fragmentation caused inefficiencies, misalignment between design and development teams, and slowed down the delivery of cohesive user experiences. In addition, Badoo’s strategy included a new rebranding and white-label products like Chat & Date, which introduced further complexity: we needed to maintain a strong brand identity while supporting flexibility and customization across different applications and platforms (web, iOS, and Android).

At Badoo, I led the effort to develop a unified design system — later named Cosmos. My responsibilities included auditing existing design files, identifying gaps and redundancies, restructuring design documentation, and building a scalable and modular system. I also facilitated alignment between design and engineering by collaborating closely with both teams, organizing workshops, and driving adoption of modern Figma features such as variables, themes, and component properties. Ensuring cross-platform compatibility and supporting brand consistency across Badoo and its white-label products were central to my role.

Me and the Design System's team, created Cosmos, a standardized, scalable design system designed to serve Badoo’s core product (and Bumble) and its white-label offerings. The solution included:

• A complete Figma audit to identify inconsistencies and opportunities for improvement.
• Modular UI components built with flexibility in mind, leveraging Figma variables, themes, and properties.
• Standardized design tokens to enable faster handoff and development.
• Thorough testing to ensure seamless performance across web, iOS, and Android platforms.
• Workshops and feedback sessions to align teams and encourage adoption.

The result was a significant reduction in design and development time, enhanced consistency and quality across platforms, and a flexible foundation that enabled Badoo’s products — including Chat & Date — to maintain their unique customizations while adhering to a cohesive design language.

Cosmos became the shared foundation for Badoo, Bumble and their white-label products. What it changed:

• One design system serving Badoo, Bumble and white-label apps like Chat & Date, each keeping its own look through theming instead of separate libraries.
• I led the design side of rolling out design tokens across the organisation: a global model of core, semantic and component tokens in Tokens Studio, supporting every brand.
• Short training videos I created helped designers adopt tokens and the new Figma workflow without lengthy onboarding.
• Faster design-to-development handoff and more consistent quality across web, iOS and Android.
• Badoo won the Huawei AppGallery Editor’s Choice Award 2023 — Best App of the Year.