CITICINEMAS - MAY 22
Increasing Ticket Sales by Improving the User Experience
Reduce Friction, Increase Registrations, and Improve Performance in the Purchase Flow.
Coltrane Design System
Scaling foundations for an enterprise organization
| Organization: | Coppel |
| Platforms: | Web · iOS · Android |
| Scale: | +65 product designers and multiple development teams |
| My role: | Principal of Foundations / Design Systems |
| Project time: | 2022 – 2026 |
Executive Summary
Coppel is an enterprise organization with multiple digital products and platforms, where more than 65 product designers collaborate with multiple development teams working in parallel.
When I joined, there was an initial design system created by an external vendor. Although functional, it lacked real adoption, governance, and the ability to scale at the pace of the business. In parallel, the organization was facing a corporate rebrand and a deep technological transformation.
My responsibility as Principal of Foundations was to design an evolution strategy for the system that would allow scaling foundations without disrupting existing products or generating regressions.
The Challenge
The organization faced three forces at the same time:
- Decoupled frontend and new technological architectures
- Corporate rebrand with radical visual identity changes
- Design decisions impacting dozens of products and teams in parallel
The main risk was not visual, but organizational: breaking the operation or slowing future evolution.
The Key Decision
Instead of replacing the existing system, I structured Coltrane in two clear layers:
Coltrane Legacy
- Stable base of the system
- Support for existing products
- Operational continuity for active teams
Coltrane Bubble
- New evolutionary layer of the system
- New structure of semantic tokens
- Accessibility integrated from foundations
- Alignment with the rebrand
- Preparation for new platforms and products
This decision allowed evolving the system without breaking the operation, reducing organizational risk and facilitating progressive adoption.
Redefining Foundations
One of the most relevant changes was the redefinition of foundations and tokens.
Before (Legacy):
- Primitive colors
- Implicit semantics
- High margin for error in design decisions
After (Bubble):
- Tokens defined by role, element, and state
- Explicit and predictable semantics
- Significant reduction in visual variability
This allowed designers to make more consistent decisions with less friction.
Accessibility as a Foundation of the System
The rebrand introduced visually more expressive colors, but with insufficient contrast for accessible text.
The decision was: respect the brand visual language and create specific tokens for accessible text.
This allowed integrating accessibility from foundations, avoiding future debt and rework on components.
Components and Platforms
From this new base:
- Decoupled libraries were built for iOS and Android
- Components designed for reuse, accessibility, and consistency
- Preparation to scale to new flows and products
My role was not to execute all components, but to define the system, establish the process, and ensure quality and adoption together with the teams.
Governance and Process
To ensure real adoption in a context of more than 65 product designers, I established:
- Component roadmap
- Weekly checkpoints
- Accessibility validation
- Continuous alignment with development
The design system stopped being a design file and became a shared language between design and development.
Impact
- Reduction from ~84 colors to ~32 well-defined tokens
- Fewer design errors in products
- Greater visual consistency across platforms
- Progressive adoption without disrupting the operation
- Coltrane recognized internally as design and platform reference at the organizational level
Learnings
- A design system scales by the decisions it protects, not by the number of components
- Adoption comes from internal involvement, not imposition
- Evolving without breaking requires architecture, judgment, and timing
- As Principal, sometimes it is necessary to take risks to protect the future of the system
Result
Coltrane Bubble became:
- The base of the digital rebrand
- The starting point for new products
- An organizational reference for quality and coherence
This project consolidated my role as Principal of Foundations: creating clarity, reducing risk, and laying the foundations for the organization's digital future.