How AIA Qi Design System speeds up development and consistency

0 min read

15 Jan 2025

As teams race to deliver digital experiences at scale, AIA's Qi Design System proves its worth with significant efficiency gains. Data shows how systematic design turns hours into minutes.

Picture this: A designer could spend more than 20 minutes crafting a standard interface component, only to learn that dozens of colleagues across different markets are simultaneously reinventing the same wheel. This was the reality before AIA's Qi Design System. Our metrics have revealed how this game-changing system has slashed design times by up to 76%, transforming the way teams work across our markets in Asia Pacific.

Test driving

We set up a testing scenario that involved building a simple claims form, testing 20 internal and external designers across Asia. The results proved our hypothesis. Without a design system in place, the task took an average of 14 minutes and 37 seconds to complete. When utilising Qi components, this time dropped to an average of just 5 minutes and 26 seconds — a 61% reduction. Even more remarkably, with Qi templates, the same task took only 3 minutes and 36 seconds on average, representing a total time reduction of 74%.

How the individual teams performed⁠

The external designers, who had no prior experience of designing AIA interfaces, had a baseline time of 18 minutes and 29 seconds reduced to 6 minutes and 39 seconds with Qi components (63% reduction), and further decreased to 4 minutes and 44 seconds with templates (73% reduction).The internal designers demonstrated perhaps the most efficient baseline performance, starting at 10 minutes and 19 seconds. This was reduced to 4 minutes and 13 seconds with components (60% reduction), and an impressive 2 minutes and 34 seconds with templates (76% reduction).

Impact beyond metrics

While these time savings are impressive, they represent just the initial design phase. In real-world applications, forms and components undergo multiple rounds of customer testing, iterations, and user acceptance testing. Yet even as a baseline metric, these findings clearly demonstrate the efficiency gains a design system can deliver to your workflow.The implementation of the Qi Design System has shown that with the right tools and templates, design teams can reduce their work time by up to three-quarters, allowing more focus on innovation and user experience rather than repetitive design tasks.The progressive enhancement from baseline to components to templates also demonstrates the value of a comprehensive design system approach. Each layer of systematisation brings additional time savings, proving that investment in design systems pays dividends in development speed and efficiency.

[The Qi design system] has been an essential tool in optimising our design processes. By leveraging its pre-built and tested components, we managed to save time and effort, while ensuring consistent and user-friendly experiences across all AIA+ features ... [Qi] offers a wider range of ready-to-use components, which improved the quality and speed of UI development.
Afees AshroffChief Technology OfficerAIA Singapore

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