Sparkbox is proud to have had a multi-year project with Gap, Inc., beginning in 2014 and extending until the post-pandemic era.
In that time, we worked with Gap to create more modern platforms, better user experiences, and greater value for users and the business. Throughout all our work together, no effort has presented as diverse a set of challenges (and opportunities) as Stitch, Gap’s design system.
In 2014, Gap’s web experience trailed behind its high design standards, and their team set out to deliver a more beautiful, intentional experience. Gap designers produced a fresh aesthetic, which Sparkbox helped to translate into a modern, unified frontend platform alongside Gap engineers.
In order to serve the Stitch team’s various skill sets and day-to-day goals, they identified two major streams of work that would need to run in parallel and in balance:
Documentation and Display: Documenting the system contents and refining their display to meet users’ varied needs.
Content Growth: Broadening and deepening the included system components to keep pace with a growing, prolific organization.
The Stitch team maintained balance in this work through its weekly cadence of stakeholder feedback. Content and feature experiments were modeled after real user workflows, then sketched, prototyped, and user tested by designers and developers weekly. Throughout this project, the Stitch and Sparkbox teams maintained a short feedback loop to build, measure, and learn. This included planning weekly goals to stay focused and learn fast.
Today, the Stitch Design System is a stable, mature, and valuable asset to the organization, bridging the gap between design, user experience, and development. We’ve worked with Gap’s internal design and development teams to iterate on its content and architecture, even integrating it into modern JavaScript frameworks and the frontend build as part of modern development best practices.
Since the start of this work in 2014, the Stitch product has helped Gap create the following:
80% Time saved in design and specs
75% Time saved in development
+$2M Year over year cost savings
300% Return on investment in first 3 years
You might be interested in this presentation by a Sparkboxer and a Gap team member about the Stitch design system and see some sample screenshots of Stitch in the following pages. View the websites for each Gap Inc. division: Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Athleta.
