Executive Summary
In the digital era, operational efficiency and brand consistency are pillars of success for any product. This article explores PedidosYa’s experience — a leading platform in Latin America — in implementing and renewing its Design System. Through insights from Nicolás Fornaro (Platform Engineer Director) and Alejandro Prieto (UX Director), we analyse how this strategic investment not only solved scalability and consistency challenges, but also improved key business metrics and enhanced the user experience. Discover crucial learnings and practical advice for leaders looking to optimise their digital teams and technology products.
Our podcast Digital Experience by Soho dives into the world of Design Systems, highlighting their crucial role in the efficiency and consistency of digital product development. In episode #94 of the podcast, Martin Picerno spoke with Nicolás Fornaro, Platform Engineer Director, and Alejandro Prieto, UX Director at PedidosYa, about their extensive experience implementing and revamping their Design System.
A Necessary Change: Why a Revamp of the Design System?
PedidosYa, a leading platform in Latin America with millions of users, faced multiple challenges that made a redesign of its Design System inevitable.
From a UX and brand equity perspective, Alejandro Prieto explained that the app did not sufficiently reflect the brand identity — with its distinctive red colour, curves, and sense of dynamism. In addition, the scale of the organisation, split into “tribes” (teams focused on specific areas such as restaurants, supermarkets, or payments), led to divergence in the look and feel of interface elements. This not only harmed the user experience, but also increased the learning curve for new users and created visual inconsistency.
From a technology standpoint, Nicolás Fornaro pointed out that this divergence resulted in duplicated implementation effort. That directly affected key metrics such as:
- App size.
- The amount of data exchanged.
- Load speed.
These factors directly impacted the app’s smoothness and responsiveness, especially on mid-range or low-end devices and slower networks. The inconsistency was not only a design problem — it was an engineering challenge that translated into lower perceived quality for users.
“Design inconsistency wasn’t just an aesthetic issue — it was an engineering challenge that directly impacted perceived quality and operational efficiency.”
The Design System: Design or Engineering? An Essential Synergy
One interesting moment in the conversation was the debate around the term “Design System” and how it is perceived. Alejandro argued that the name is perfect because it combines “Design”, which is his domain, and “System”, which belongs to engineering — reflecting the essential synergy between the two.
Nicolás added that a Design System is “many products in one”, because it is the outcome of UX work to understand users and then translate that understanding into code, adapting to native platforms like Android, iOS, and the web. They agreed that modern design means being able to project a system made up of different parts serving specific functions — going beyond aesthetics and focusing on scalability and functionality in digital products.
Key Learnings and Challenges Overcome During Implementation
PedidosYa’s experience implementing its Design System produced valuable learnings:
- Design System governance:
Decentralisation of the previous Design System — while allowing teams to create new components — led to an unmanageable proliferation of variants (for example, 11 versions of a restaurant “card” or 5 versions of a pop-up). PedidosYa therefore moved to a centralised model, where the Platform and UXOps teams “own” the Design System. While this ensures consistency, it demands strong communication and low-latency response times to support requests from many teams. - Business and User Experience (UX) impact:
The revamp had a significant impact on key metrics. The main goal was not to “break anything”, and not only did app health metrics not deteriorate — some even improved. Standardisation and faster, more efficient problem resolution enabled improvements in conversion and user retention. The initiative was initially called “Visual Revamp” and aimed to deliver a consistent and attractive “skin”, without changing layout to avoid disrupting user familiarity. This strategy worked: there were no major drops in business metrics and the updated experience was well received by users on social media. - The importance of culture and shared understanding:
Nicolás Fornaro emphasised the danger of assuming all developers are aligned. During implementation, they realised not everyone interpreted designs in the same way or understood the significance of what they were building. Giving meaning and purpose to the work — and establishing a shared culture and ways of working — proved crucial for improving productivity and agility across digital teams. - The “wow moment” and business confidence:
Building the Design System required significant investment and pausing other initiatives, which meant stakeholders had to back a period of long-term promises. A key milestone came when the revamp was presented at a leadership event and the updated app was placed directly in leaders’ hands. The reaction was genuine surprise, validating the effort and building confidence in the chosen direction. - Flexibility and adaptability:
Alejandro Prieto highlighted that there are no “foolproof recipes” and that every company is different. It is essential to understand yourself as an organisation and as a team, identify strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to test and adapt models rather than clinging to familiar approaches that are not working. - Platform as an enabler:
Beyond being a living, evolving product, PedidosYa sees the Design System as a platform. From an engineering perspective, it is part of the “Developer Experience”, providing services and tooling that help developers work efficiently, prioritising consistency, quality, and scalability. On the design side, the Design System is mirrored in tools such as Figma, improving handoff and allowing designers to focus on user experience at a more strategic level rather than the screen’s syntactic details. - Future challenges: accessibility and localisation:
Despite the progress, PedidosYa recognises ongoing challenges. Accessibility is a priority and, while the Design System architecture can accelerate work in this area, it is still not sufficiently embedded in many Latin American companies’ agendas. Another area of exploration is localisation and regionalisation — not only at content level, but also within experiences and interactions — so the app resonates with local realities across the 15 countries where they operate.
Key Advice for Leaders Driving Design Systems
Nicolás Fornaro and Alejandro Prieto shared their key advice for leaders looking to drive Design Systems in their organisations and improve digital team efficiency:
From Engineering (Nicolás Fornaro):
- Start small: Pick a small set of key components to focus the work and understand the challenges. This reduces the fear of starting a large-scale initiative.
- Secure the tooling: Having the right tools for building, reusing, and distributing the Design System (CI/CD, quality checks) is essential for smooth workflows and team productivity.
- Culture and shared understanding: Do not assume every developer is aligned. It is crucial to give meaning and rationale to the work, build a shared culture and ways of working, and ensure everyone understands the importance of what is being built.
From User Experience (Alejandro Prieto):
- Understand the problems you are solving: Run a thorough audit to clearly identify what the Design System is intended to solve (consistency, brand equity, accessibility, etc.).
- Define the architecture together: Architecture must be tied to the problems being solved and to how the Design System will be used. It is vital that UX and developers collaborate on the architecture definition, agreeing shared parameters, patterns, and naming conventions to enable efficient future workflows.
- Don’t forget accessibility: Build usability and accessibility into the Design System from day one, ensuring aspects such as contrast, legibility, and minimum typography sizes are baked in by default. This makes future accessibility improvements and standards compliance far easier.
PedidosYa’s experience shows that implementing a Design System is a strategic investment with transformational impact across the business, the user experience, and operational efficiency. Ongoing dialogue between design and engineering is the key to building a robust platform that can scale and deliver exceptional user experiences in an increasingly complex digital environment.
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- Quantify the value of UX.
- Identify blind spots in your workflows.
- Accelerate the digitalisation of your services.
- Implement or improve a strategic Design System.
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