Client
Olympia
Role
Design system, UX, CX and BX design, CRO implementation. Art direction developed in collaboration with my creative lead, who laid the visual foundations.
Scope
UX/UI
Accessibility Design
Website Design System
Duration
10 weeks
Background
Recruitment websites tend to serve a wide and varied audience. Olympia's is skewed toward blue collar and vocational job seekers, a group that is often underserved by digital platforms that assume a certain level of literacy or tech confidence. The new site needed to work just as well for someone applying for a warehouse role on their phone as for an employer posting multiple vacancies. WCAG compliance was a hard requirement, accessibility features had to be genuinely useful rather than box-ticking, and the site needed to convert across 36+ template pages without feeling clinical or cold.
Approach
The design system was built in Figma as the foundation for everything: a comprehensive component library, typography, colour and spacing rules that could scale across all 36 pages without losing consistency. Colour and contrast ratios were checked against WCAG AA throughout, with key high-traffic pages pushed to AAA. Early in the process, feasibility conversations with development shaped which directions were worth refining. Some more complex UX flows, like multi-step conditional contact forms, were scoped out before they got too far. That discipline kept the project moving. Other features required more advocacy: read-aloud buttons and map/list view toggles for vacancies were questioned as out of scope, but framing them as conversion levers backed by usage data from comparable platforms got them across the line. Both are in the final build. Figma AI became a real part of the workflow for managing the scale of 36+ pages, generating layout variations from existing component blocks and keeping the system consistent without cutting corners.
Outcome
The result is a fully documented design system of 40+ unique components across 36+ pages, built to WCAG AA standard throughout, with key high-traffic pages reaching AAA. What makes it more than a compliance exercise is that the accessibility features were designed in from the start: read-aloud buttons, plain language summaries, breadcrumb navigation, not added at the end. For a platform serving people who are often underserved by digital products, that distinction matters. The site is currently in dev stage while sister sites are in the design stage, aided by this system.
