Premier Inn UK - Design System
Premier Inn UK - Design System
Product Designer / Lead UI Designer
Role
2021-2024
Duration
Design, Engineering, QA, Product
Team
Tools
Figma, Jira
When I joined Premier Inn in 2021, different teams were designing the same things in different ways. The website, the app, and the booking engine all had their own visual language and their own component libraries. In some cases, even the colour usage was inconsistent between digital and print. For users it meant a fractured experience. For the people building it, it meant slow cycles, constant rework, and no shared point of reference.
Over three years, I led the creation of a design system that gave every team working on Premier Inn's digital products a single foundation to build from.
Changing how teams worked together
One of the first practical moves was shifting the entire design operation to Figma. This is a tooling decision on the surface, but it changed the working culture. Designers, developers, and product managers could look at the same file at the same time, which cut out a lot of the miscommunication that happened across handoffs.
I also integrated the design workflow into JIRA so that business analysts could request changes through a proper, trackable process. Version history became visible to everyone, and QA teams always knew which designs were signed off before they started testing.
Building the system
I structured the design system on atomic design principles, building from the smallest reusable units upward. The system is organised into two layers.
Foundations cover the building blocks: colour palettes, typography, spacing, and base-level components like buttons and input fields. Before this work, there were no clear guidelines for how even colour should be used across the brand. I documented everything, including what each colour meant, where it should appear, and how it should behave across contexts.
Components are the more complex patterns, organised by function: global navigation, interactive tools, editorial content. By building on consistent foundations, these components could be assembled and reused without having to redesign from scratch each time.
Supporting the replatforming
The timing of the design system work mattered. Premier Inn was in the middle of a major migration from its legacy in-house platform, Bart, to Opera. Having a structured template library in place meant the visual experience stayed consistent throughout the transition. The system made it possible to replatform at pace without accumulating new inconsistencies in the process.
Getting people to use it
Building a design system is one problem. Getting an organisation to actually adopt it is a different one. I ran workshops with stakeholders and team members across the business to train them on the new processes and tools, and to demonstrate why the consistency was worth the effort of changing old habits.
That part of the work took patience. Different departments had different priorities, and balancing a consistent system with the specific needs of each platform required ongoing negotiation. But by the end, the system was genuinely embedded in how the company builds things.
