Building a product and its design system — as the only designer

Allyz Assist — Allianz’s insurance assistance platform: book roadside help, a doctor or a repair without calling a call center.

Client

Allianz Partners

Role

Senior Product Designer (sole)

Timeline

Aug 2023 – Nov 2024 · 1.5 years

Scope

UX · UI · Design System · Research

TL;DR

The whole case in 30 seconds

The problem

Insurance assistance was phone-only: slow, opaque, impossible to scale. The product was a few pages assembled without a designer, and the dev team had never worked with one.

What I did

Sole designer for 1.5 years — research, personas, CJM, information architecture, end-to-end UI, and a design system built from scratch, while teaching the team how to work with design.

The outcome

MVP launched in France in December 2023 and expanded to Poland. The design system was adopted by Allianz as the foundation for all Allyz verticals.

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The challenge

"All insurance assistance was requested by phone. We needed to move it fully online — fast, clear, and from any device."

When I joined, the project consisted of a few pages and a couple of modal windows. There was no dedicated designer — the initial UI had been assembled by designers from other verticals whenever they had spare time, and it showed: inconsistent patterns, no system, no research foundation. The development team had never worked closely with a designer before.

The audience made the stakes concrete: insurance holders aged 35–60, busy people who needed practical help fast. Competitive analysis showed the European market lacked convenient digital assistance services — most solutions were outdated, with only partial online transitions. The opportunity was clear: request a service quickly, easily, with minimal bureaucracy.

User pain points

Phone ordering was opaque and slow. Users didn't know what services their insurance covered. No history, no status updates, no digital presence.

Business challenge

Scale across countries (France → Poland), manage service catalogs digitally, process all requests through a back-office system.

What I did

Research · Architecture · UI · System

User Research

Interviews, surveys, competitive analysis, usability testing. Built Personas and Customer Journey Map.

Information Architecture

Full Site Map covering user portal and admin back-office. Multiple user flow diagrams for all service scenarios.

UI Design

End-to-end UI for a fast-growing platform, built on top of an existing brand while creating new patterns.

Design System

Built from scratch: full component library, tokens, specs, variants. Adopted later across all Allyz verticals.

Prototyping

Interactive prototypes for stakeholder and partner presentations. Iterated from master proto to versioned docs.

Dev Collaboration

First designer the dev team ever worked with. Taught them the design process and created developer-friendly docs.

Process

From research to production

User Personas — primary audience aged 35–60, insurance holders needing practical assistance

Customer Journey Map — from recognizing a service need to post-request follow-up

User flows — multiple branching scenarios mapped to identify optimization opportunities

Site Map — full architecture of user portal + administrator back-office

The design system story

There was no design system when I joined — a handful of screens and a brand guide, which is where the colors and typography come from. The visual direction was largely set before me; what I built is the system around it. Nobody asked for it — I took it on because every undocumented component was slowing down both me and the developers.

I rebuilt it into a full design system: component library, tokens, specs, and documented variants — built during downtime between feature work, alongside the UJM, information architecture, and site map. Maintaining all of it solo, while the main focus stayed on shipping the product, was the hardest constraint of the project.

Interactive prototypes used in stakeholder and partner presentations

Results

What changed

Phone-only → fully online

A process that used to require a phone call became a digital flow available anytime, from any device — with service catalogs managed digitally and every request processed through the back-office platform I designed alongside the user portal.

Shipped to two markets

The MVP launched in France in December 2023 and kept iterating from there. Before I left, the product expanded to the Polish market — the architecture and design system were built to make that scaling possible.

Design system adopted company-wide

The main Allianz design team took my system as the foundation for all Allyz verticals — built by one designer, adopted by the whole product family.

A team that works with design

Developers who had never worked with a designer now use the design system, specs, and flows daily. The artifacts I built between feature work — UJM, IA, site map — became shared tools, not designer-only documents.

Recommendation

What a colleague says

German Orlov

Global Head of Home & Cyber Digital Solutions · API-first B2B2C Platform Transformation · Allianz Executive

"Alina was our UX designer from August 2023 to November 2024 and played an instrumental role in transforming our product design. She not only took full ownership of the design process — cleaning up chaos and reorganizing structures swiftly — but also pioneered our first design system, which later became a best practice across the organization. Alina's independent vision, assertiveness, and genuine curiosity about both product and business make her an outstanding asset. I wholeheartedly recommend her to any agile team seeking a strong individual contributor."

LinkedIn recommendation

Lessons learned

What this project taught me

The master prototype that became a monster

Early on, I built a single master prototype covering the entire service — every implemented screen plus concepts the developers hadn't even estimated yet. For stakeholder presentations it was brilliant: one artifact that showed the full potential of the project and made future roadmap discussions tangible.

Then it became a liability. Version confusion crept in, the volume of frames became impossible to keep current, and "the prototype" stopped being a source of truth. The fix was discipline over ambition: one prototype, in the primary language, containing only shipped pages and what's currently in development. Presentation impact is worth less than an artifact the team can trust.

Teaching a team to work with design is part of the design work

The dev team had never worked with a designer. Handing them polished mockups wasn't enough — I had to teach the process itself: what a handoff is, why specs matter, how to read the design system, when to pull me in. That education effort paid off more than any individual screen: it's why the system is actually used rather than admired.

Solo means ruthless prioritization

As the only designer, I couldn't keep everything perfect — the design system, the research artifacts, and the product itself all competed for the same hours. I learned to treat infrastructure work (DS, IA, flows) as an investment made during downtime between feature work, and to accept "actively used and good enough" over "complete but late."