Reforge: Scaling Presentation Quality Without Scaling Designer Hours
Reforge's Executives-in-Residence (EIR) each had a dedicated designer for their presentation needs — a setup that wasn't sustainable as the company scaled. Reallocating that designer time meant EIRs would need to build their own decks. The challenge: how do you remove the expert while maintaining quality and brand consistency for non-designers?
O V E R V I E W
Role
I was the sole designer in charge of figuring out the UX of the design guides and creating the material for it.
Deliverables
Build out a design guide that would empower EIRs to create their own decks while staying within Reforge’s brand, and ultimately, minimize visual designer involvement.
Repository of past case study decks
Business Outcomes & Impact
50 Designer hours saved per cohort, with 2-3 cohorts a year
The design system successfully shifted deck ownership to EIRs — freeing designers to focus on higher-priority work. In cases where EIRs still sought hands-on help, designers could point them to the system instead of starting from scratch, reducing dependency without sacrificing quality
D E S I G N P R I N C I P L E S
Just-in-time
Putting how-to instruction where they were likely to need it instead of getting them to exit the flow.
Reduce Cognitive Friction
Use more images and videos to explain how-to do things since the learning science has shown that mechanical work is best shown visually.
Exhaustive
Designers could just drop links of every kind of how-to instead of taking time to demo.
P R O C E S S
Credit to Olena Panasovska for the icons
