User Experience & Interface Design

By Nicole Kanters, art director

At Kega, we enjoy a good challenge. And let’s be honest: there are plenty of them. Today, we design interfaces for more users, in more situations, on more devices, with more browsers, screen sizes, and capabilities than ever before.

Take your smartphone. In just a few minutes you can check the weather, view your balance in your banking app, and order a car through a taxi service. Or imagine you want to pick up food from your favorite restaurant before you leave. You can open the menu, place your order, choose whether you want to pick it up or have it delivered, and pay for everything on a single website.

In fact, before you started reading this article, you may already have interacted with one or more of those interfaces. If so, you’ve experienced the work of a user interface (UI) designer. It’s not a simple task, but it’s exactly what makes our hearts beat faster. UX and UI designers shape the way people interact with technology by designing the visual layer of an app, website, or other product. Human skills like empathy, strategic thinking, and creative problem-solving can’t be replicated by AI, which is why UX and UI skills are still in high demand. Luckily, we don’t have to do it alone. Design system methodologies give us structure, breathing room, and creativity.

Atomic Design: The moment the lightbulb goes on

Atomic Design helps us build robust and scalable design systems. It forces you to see interfaces not as a collection of pixels, but as a thoughtful hierarchy of small, smart building blocks. That way of thinking is exactly what enables us to develop faster, more consistently, and with higher quality.

Our Global Design System is fully based on this methodology. That makes it easier to reuse and translate across different platforms and projects, such as apps and webshops.

Our experience with the Atomic Design–based Global Design System for HANOS was our starting point. We enriched and expanded this system, and with that knowledge we developed our own Global Design System, which now forms the foundation for future design projects. This design system brings a sense of clarity like having a toolbox where every tool knows exactly what it’s supposed to do. And it works. Every single time.

The Orangebag journey: from first sketch to runway moment

Recently, we had the opportunity to develop a completely new webshop for Orangebag, a brand known for style, taste, and a strong visual identity. And here too, we wholeheartedly chose our Global Design System and the Atomic Design approach.

We brought along the lessons we learned earlier at HANOS, and that immediately paid off. Thanks to our reusable UI components, we were able to deliver a webshop that not only looks incredibly consistent, but can also be iterated on and expanded at high speed.

Collaborating, learning, and getting the most out of technology

What made this project even more special was the close collaboration with our technical colleagues. Together, we took a deep dive into the base boilerplate and got to know every detail. That not only led to an even better end result, but also delivered valuable insights for future projects.

Orangebag works with Storyblok design blocks, so we guided their team on how to use them to their full potential. Now they can build inspiring pages themselves and give their creativity free rein exactly what a fashion brand deserves.

A proud client, a proud Kega

A highly visual brand like Orangebag has sky-high expectations. That challenges us—and we love it. During their fashion show, which we were invited to, we saw how proud they were as they gave customers and suppliers a sneak preview of the new webshop design. The first reactions? Overwhelmingly positive.

Later that evening, a customer said spontaneously: “That new shop looks sleek. When can I start shopping?” That was the ultimate compliment.

Projects like this show why we do what we do. Building something together that everyone can be proud of: designers, developers, clients, and end users. This is teamwork at its best.

Want to put the power of a well-thought-out design system and our UX/UI expertise to work for your brand or are you curious how our Global Design System can take your project to the next level? We’d love to talk. Get in touch, and let’s create your “aha moment” together.