Modularity in Practice: Design Systems in Digital Banking

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores how Nordnet Bank’s design system shapes everyday digital product development, with a focus on perceived efficiency, alignment, and consistency in the creation of digital user experiences. The study is framed as a qualitative case study with ethnographic elements and applies semi-structured interviews and participant observation, analyzed through directed qualitative content analysis. The design system is treated as both a practical infrastructure (Figma libraries and a coded user interface kit in Storybook) and a collaboration artifact that teams rely on when proposing, implementing, and maintaining interface solutions. Nordnet Bank provides a relevant case of study, due to the scale and complexity of its digital products, its mature design system across design and development, and an organizational need for strong alignment and consistency. The findings show that the design system is widely experienced as a driver of efficiency through reuse of high-fidelity components and centralized tokens, enabling faster design assembly and smoother implementation. At the same time, the results highlight recurring friction where efficiency and alignment drop: edge cases lead to “local” one-offs which exist outside the main body of components as the coded kit can lag behind the Figma library, and unclear ownership and weak documentation force extra coordination. While participants largely describe the system as a shared language that supports cross-functional alignment and improves consistency at scale, the study concludes that these benefits depend on ongoing maintenance, resourcing, communication, and clearer usage guidelines.