Anjali Kumar

WORK

PLAY

ABOUT

Voyage: Leading Chalo’s first large scale design system

Powering 10+ public transport products

CONTEXT

Chalo, a fast-growing mobility startup, built 10+ products over the past decade for passengers, drivers, conductors, operators, and internal teams.

Rapid launches fueled growth but also left behind design debt, scattered styles, inconsistent interactions, and a fragmented brand identity.

As the team scaled, these gaps grew harder to ignore, so I took on the challenge of building a unified design system.

Chalo, a fast-growing mobility startup, built 10+ products over the past decade for passengers, drivers, conductors, operators, and internal teams.

Rapid launches fueled growth but also left behind design debt, scattered styles, inconsistent interactions, and a fragmented brand identity.

As the team scaled, these gaps grew harder to ignore, so I took on the challenge of building a unified design system.

GOALS

Ensure brand consistency

while staying flexible for varied use cases

Enable

quick use

Enable quick use

by designers, developers, PMs and marketers

Support all

products

Support all products

in the Chalo ecosytem (mobile, tablet and web)

Promote

accessibility

Promote accessibility

for users of varied abilities and different contexts

MY ROLE

Project Lead

TEAM

5 designers (collaborating closely with devs + PMs)

5 designers (+ devs and PMs)

TIMELINE

4 months for V1

IMPACT

60%

reduction in design redundancy, eliminating duplicate styles & assets

75%

of new screens built using design system, reflecting adoption

40%

faster cycles, enabling quicker ideation, handoff & shipping

10+

products unified across mobile, web, and tablet

KEY CHALLENGE

How to build a system with no dedicated bandwidth?

With no full-time bandwidth, I designed a two-team weekly sprint model that allowed everyone to contribute without derailing core product work. We rotated teams often to avoid fatigue.

Team A:

Scouts

Team A: Scouts

Audited and refined components, mapping out properties.

Team B:

Builders

Team B: Builders

Scaled refined designs into robust, reusable components using tokens & variants.

The pipeline:

Audit → build → deploy

The pipeline: Audit → build → deploy

Every Thursday, Scouts handed off 3 components to Builders, creating a continuous & practical workflow.

PROCESS STEP 1

Audit, Refine, Benchmark

We built a master checklist of all styles and components, pulling variations from Figma files across products. Each was refined by removing duplicates, aligning on flexible brand-consistent versions, and benchmarking against market and accessibility standards.

STEP 2

Clear "handoff matrix" for all components

Each sprint, Team A refined 3 components and handed them to Team B with a clear matrix of states, tokens, and usage rules, minimising back-and-forth and keeping the process efficient.

Handoff matrix for buttons

STEP 3

Building a comprehensive library with intuitive properties

We built style tokens (atoms), component variants (molecules), and templates for complex patterns like tables and bottom sheets. Each was annotated with guidelines.

Simple properties for fast experimentation

Mindful details to quickly adapt to context

Nested components for high flexibility

STEP 4

Adoption & rollout across products

As products entered research-driven revamps, we used each redesign as a natural entry point to introduce new components while systematically phasing out old ones, both in design and dev.

REVIEWS

Reviews and impact

Ratings from developers, designers and marketers reflected a significant improvement in ideation speed, design-dev handoff and implementation of consistency.

Aditi

OPERATOR APP DESIGNER

The design system has drastically reduced redundan work and allowed me to focus more on real user problems. It brought much needed structure to our design process.

Charvi

INTERNAL TOOL DESIGNER

Working with Anjali has been an absolute pleasure. The design system along with her UI reviews are thoughtful, detail oriented and she's always ready with creative & out of the box ideas.

Arif

MARKETING MANAGER

With Voyage, I can pull components that are already aligned with Chalo’s visual language. I love the consistency, whether it’s a ticketing screen or a festival banner, the look and feel ties back to the same system.

Deepak

PASSENGER APP DEV

Before Voyage, handoff meant endless back-and-forth to match spacing, tokens, and states. Now, ambiguity has reduced and honestly our relationship with design is much smoother and less stressful.

STEP 5

Maintainence & future scope

A design system is never “done”, it must evolve with new requirements and scale alongside the company. We set up a dedicated Slack channel where designers, developers, and PMs could request components, suggest updates, and flag issues. We have continued our Thursday meetings to refine and innovate :)

We’re now shaping Voyage 2.0 to expand patterns and introduce delight through sound, motion, and micro-interactions, while refining guidelines and governance to keep adoption effortless.

REFLECTIONS

Participation drives adoption

The system succeeded because it was participatory, everyone was part of the building process. I learned that collective ownership and diverse inputs can make a system more intuitive, sustainable, and genuinely useful.

The hidden work behind speed

Small details, clear naming, consistent states, responsive components, built trust and confidence across teams. I learnt that attention to micro-interactions and documentation doesn’t just polish a system, it fuels speed, adoption, and long-term scalability.

Context shapes usability

We saw global design systems with endless components and properties, but copying & using them would have overwhelmed our fast moving team. Instead, we focused on our context, bandwidth, and users. Designers, developers, and PMs needed something lean, fast, and easy to adopt. The spirit was: start simple → fix fast → then innovate if needed. It reinforced for me that, like any interface, a design system must be iterative and designed for its users first.

PREVIOUS PROJECT

NEXT PROJECT

LET'S TALK ALL THINGS HUMAN

s.anjalikumar100@gmail.com

सृजन् आनंदम्

“Creation is joy.” Everything I design is an act of joy, curiosity, and care for the people who will use it.

WORK

PLAY

ABOUT

LET'S TALK ALL THINGS HUMAN

s.anjalikumar100@gmail.com

सृजन् आनंदम्

“Creation is joy.” Everything I design is an act of joy, curiosity, and care for the people who will use it.

LET'S TALK ALL THINGS HUMAN

s.anjalikumar100@gmail.com

सृजन् आनंदम्

“Creation is joy.” Everything I design is an act of joy, curiosity, and care for the people who will use it.