Tietoevry Fintech — 
Powering the Norwegian banks’ innovation with accessible design systems

I helped renew contracts with a series of Norwegian banks by improving UX processes, leading the evolution of the design system, and facilitating better collaboration through a clear design strategy.

Lead UX Designer

• Design Systems
• Interaction Design
• Accessibility
• Systems Thinking
• Process Leadership
• Design Strategy

• Ecosystem of complex legacy systems, past tech and design decisions, making things inconsistent and difficult to build on.
• Lack of resources, with big changes ahead. Client contracts ending, and restructuring in the process that stretched the teams thin.
• Team structure no longer fits the circumstances. Processes create waste.
• The design system can’t scale, it had no further direction, and little focus on innovation.

My assignment as Lead UX Designer for Tietoevry’s Banking as a Platform was to manage and contribute to user experience across 12 decentralised product teams by driving UX strategy, improving processes, and evolving the Sebra Design System through components, tools, documentation and cross-functional collaboration.

Banking as a Platform is a modular, API-driven system that helps banks modernise core services. It supports personal, corporate, and open banking across web and mobile, delivered as SaaS, managed service, or on-premise.

1950000 private customers. 115000 corporate customers.
14+ applications. 200+ endpoints.
95 banks.

• Advocate for design system and user needs
• Evolve design system, empower non-designers to use the system

• Organise design competences for growth
• Facilitate Experience Design team, product teams and our clients

• Increase UX maturity in the company
• Create design strategy for products and services

Design system

Tietoevry Banking design system is called Sebra. Sebra is organised in an atomic buildup manner with accessibility in mind.

Sebra Mobile and Web design libraries are each built from Sebra Foundations library following Sebra’s Patterns and Principles.

Process for Adding New Components

When a team needs a new component, they check to see if it exists. If not, the task moves to a product team, who documents it in Figma and Wiki and works with the DS core team for review. After approval, the component is built, styled, tested, and added to the platform.

System and Process Scalability

As Sebra grew, so did the design debt. The designers were slowed down while development went ahead. Soon enough designers were creating a bottleneck, and started inevitably to cut corners in order to deliver on time. 

In order to improve the UX across the whole journey we needed to change how design systems are perceived in the organisation.

Design system vision

We organised a discovery session to better understand the design system needs and create a vision for the evolved design system. We discovered the need for: Consistency, Scalability, Collaboration, Democratisation, Measuring and Strategy. And we wanted a design system to be not only the tool for creation but the way we work.

Breaking the silos

We wanted to make our design system a central source of truth, with easily shared resources for everyone and to empower everybody to contribute to it and increase adoption. The design system should be able to improve over time and scale as much as needed.

Design system management tools

To implement our vision, we needed not only a solid process. but also the right tool to support governance, adoption, and usage of the design system. We conducted a global review of design system management and documentation tools and narrowed it down to three top vendors: Zeroheight, Supernova, and Knapsack.

Research criteria and results

Having in mind our design system needs reflected in our vision we defined criteria for evaluating these tools. Our documentation tool is to be measured by how much it is: Seamless, Operational, Collaborative and Strategic.

Choosing the right technology and the process is important but it is no substitute for working with people. People come first, tools second.

UX management

UX maturity

Everyone is responsible for user experience — not just designers. UX design leader needs to facilitate all parts of the organisation in order to increase the quality of user experience. 

To elevate the UX design maturity in the company, first we needed to determine the current level of maturity in Tietoevry Banking. The research revealed that the company was on stage 3: emergent. To progress from this stage, we needed to build a culture of support for UX at all levels.

Product team setup

Tietoevry Banking product development is organised in 12 agile product teams, each responsible for one part of the user journey. Every team has a product owner, business analyst, software architect and a developer and UX designer. 

The teams are highly specialised in delivering features for the part they are responsible for, but none of them has an overview of the parts of the flow they aren’t responsible for. This made the user journey fragmented.

Hybrid design team

The only way to increase the quality of user experience it is to tackle the user journey as a whole. This required moving from feature based to journey based experience design.

To enable this, we established a matrix Experience Design team, instead of decentralised, that would operate both autonomously and in team.

The designers are dispatched to product teams per need, and bring back the work to Experience Design team to be analysed through the lens of the whole user journey, maintaining the control over the quality of user experience, while allowing the product teams to remain autonomous. Win-win!

Reorganising design competences

I suggested a completely different design organisation that would enable design leadership to serve as a mediator between the competences company needs and design team aspirations, maintaining balance between stability and growth.

In order to improve the UX across the whole journey we needed to change how design systems are perceived in the organisation.

Design strategy

Together with several banks, I worked on establishing a corporate mobile user experience strategy that involved creating a vision for the user experience, aligning research with business objectives, and prioritising design efforts. 

It’s like a formula for user experience — what we should focus on, and, more importantly, what should we not focus on in order to reach the user and business goals.

Corporate banking user experience

“Micro” user experience

Process leadership

I helped develop processes for collaboration both within the design team and across key stakeholders, including developers, architects, product owners, and product managers. I supported the product teams by shaping how they engaged with design competence.

I facilitated workshops with internal teams and bank clients, ran design reviews and quality sessions, and held talks to raise UX awareness to help teams discover new ways of working, stay motivated, and collaborate more efficiently across the department.

• Renewal of contracts with a number of Norwegian banks spanning several years
• Evolution of Sebra design system with new components and patterns for web and mobile including new dark theme; new UX copy management tool; initiative for merging 2 large design systems in banking into one.
• Approved UX strategy for corporate mobile user experience
• Improved design-development hand-off process and team satisfaction

• A design system is not just a tool, it’s a way of working.
• Systems without shared ownership eventually slow everyone down.
• Fragmented experiences may reflect fragmentation in teams.
• Scaling design means scaling collaboration first.
• Consistency across journeys is more powerful than perfection in features.
• Improving UX requires support at all levels, not just good design work.

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