Carsales Retail - Platform Redesign & Design System
End-to-end retail redesign across iOS, Android, and web — plus a Figma design system the whole team adopted.
Role
UX / UI Designer
Company
Carsales
Platform
iOS Native & Web
Date
Feb 2021
OVERVIEW
Modernising Australia’s leading automotive marketplace
Carsales is Australia’s largest online automotive marketplace. When I joined this project, the retail experience across web and native apps had grown inconsistent — every new feature started from scratch, and handoffs to engineering were slow and error-prone.
THE CHALLENGE
No design system, inconsistent experience, slow handoffs
Carsales is Australia’s largest online automotive marketplace. When I joined this project, the retail experience across web and native apps had grown inconsistent — every new feature started from scratch, and handoffs to engineering were slow and error-prone.
WHAT I DID
What I owned
End-to-end retail redesign and the Figma design system — solo. Home screen, search, listing cards, enquiry flows, and the component library the wider team used day to day.
What I delivered
Retail experience redesign (home, search, listings, key flows)
Docked search, optimised listing cards, inline enquiry from card
Figma design system — typography, colour, icons, components
8px grid, atomic structure adapted for team adoption
Dev handoff kit, iOS prototype, and component documentation
IMPACT
Team efficiency and design consistency
40%
Faster creation of new screens and features using the design system
3x
Faster designer onboarding — productive in days, not weeks
KET INSIGHT
A design system is a product that serves your product team. Renaming atomic layers to Elements, Components, and Widgets wasn’t cosmetic — it determined whether the team actually adopted it.
HOW
Team efficiency and design consistency
Retail experience redesign (home, search, listings, key flows)
Docked search, optimised listing cards, inline enquiry from card
Figma design system — typography, colour, icons, components
8px grid, atomic structure adapted for team adoption
Dev handoff kit, iOS prototype, and component documentation
TAKEAWAY
Design systems succeed on adoption, not architecture
Atomic design scaled well — but only after translating it into language the team already used. The 8px grid became a shared spacing language between design and engineering, cutting review time and handoff errors.