Building Telstra’s Unified Design System

As an Experience Designer at R/GA, I worked with Telstra — Australia’s largest telecommunications provider — on an 8-month embedded engagement. Our goal: unify Telstra’s digital identity and develop a scalable design system that would bring clarity, cohesion, and consistency to all customer-facing platforms.

My role included accessibility design, UI specification, and collaborating closely with other designers, engineers, and strategists across R/GA and Telstra teams.

Telstra’s digital experience was fragmented across platforms and product teams, leading to inconsistent branding, confusing interactions, and usability issues.

Additionally, internal alignment was lacking:

• Multiple brand expressions were in use
• No centralized design system
• Accessibility and consistency were not enforced

Our challenge was to bring visual and functional unity across B2C and B2B properties, guided by a flexible yet systematic design approach that respected Telstra’s evolving brand.

We delivered a responsive, modular, and accessible design system rooted in atomic design principles. Our team focused on:

Sprint-by-sprint highlights:

Sprint 1–2

• Conducted a UX audit across customer journeys
• Ran workshops to uncover interaction inconsistencies

Sprint 3–4

• Established scalable UI guidelines
• Created reusable components for cards, CTAs, pricing tables, and forms

Sprint 5–6

• Designed and spec’d screen-level layouts for web and app
• Collaborated closely with Telstra developers to ensure fidelity

Sprint 7–8

• Delivered final UI kits, tokens, and documentation
• Supported implementation and future governance roadmap

Throughout the process, I partnered with accessibility experts and Telstra’s in-house team to ensure WCAG compliance, inclusive patterns, and forward-compatible components.

• Successfully unified Telstra’s brand across its digital ecosystem
• Developed a scalable design system used by internal and external teams
• Increased design-to-dev speed and reduced redundancy
• Enabled future product teams to prototype and build faster
• Created reusable components for common flows like plan comparison, device selection, and purchase