Elysia

Elysia is Fortescue’s battery intelligence platform; a data-dense web application built to surface insights for engineers and analysts. Brought in through KJC Creative, I eventually joined the product team’s weekly kickoffs, design standups, and dev standups independently, working as the primary designer across roughly eighteen months.

The inherited system was functional but fragile. Navigation, colour, and typography existed as published local styles, naming conventions were applied inconsistently, and components had drifted from the system over time. As the product grew beyond its MVP, the gap between design and development was widening: handoff was slower, consistency harder to guarantee.

Improvements were self-initiated alongside feature delivery. The system was restructured around atomic design principles, rebuilding detached components into a proper hierarchy so changes waterfall consistently from atom to layout. Consistent naming conventions were introduced across all components and assets, giving design and development a shared language.
A slot-based template system was developed for rapid page assembly. Flexible layout placeholders where components can be swapped in and out, with the layout staying consistent regardless of what’s inside.

A more coherent, maintainable system where components are named consistently, live in predictable places, and can be documented properly. Handoff follows a repeatable process: design pass, verbal walkthrough, file preparation, annotation, and dev mode handoff with Confluence documentation linked.

Iteration became faster and handoff noticeably cleaner: fewer queries from development, and fewer rounds of amends from the product team. The development team fed back that component consistency made their work significantly easier; rather than maintaining many similar but subtly different pieces of code, they could build and reuse components with confidence.
The real test came when a large batch of pages needed overhauling to accommodate new features. It was a substantial body of work, but the improved system meant it was manageable where, without it, the same task would have been a much larger undertaking.