Every rewards platform we've built for Wink this year runs on the same handful of screens — an offers grid, a set of redemption flows, a homepage, a profile page, some content pages. What changes each time is brand, imagery, and copy. What's costing time is treating the rest as new, every time.
Design typically runs for months, and engineering gets what's left — often two to three weeks. Designs keep changing after sign-off, and tickets marked "in development" get flipped back to "blocked." None of this is one person's fault. It happens when there's no shared set of components to design inside of, no engineering voice early, and no check that a design is actually buildable before it goes to a client.
Recommended · Design phase (timed to the project) + ~1–2 wks after
Option A — Build it into real work. Full UX/UI design for your next signed-off client build — priced and timed like any design phase, but faster than starting from scratch, because it's the same known, repeatable set of screens we've designed before, not a blank page. Once that build is live, extracting it into a reusable system is a separate, smaller step — usually another 1–2 weeks.
~5–7 weeks
Option B — Build the system first. Audit, define, and build the full component library on its own, before it touches a client. More thorough, and not tied to any one build's timing — but it's a dedicated commitment before there's a client outcome to point to.
~1–2 weeks
Option C — Guardrails, not a rebuild. A lighter foundation — tokens, a brand-guidelines request template, a build-readiness checklist — handed to your own team to use immediately. Fastest and cheapest, but only as good as the team using it.
Timings are indicative and cover the design-system work only. Cost and a firm scope follow once a direction's picked.
This is a starting point for our conversation, not a locked-in plan — keen to hear which of these, if any, fits.