One design language across three platforms that disagree

Every multi-platform product says it wants consistency. What people usually mean is sameness — and sameness is exactly wrong, because an iOS user and an Android user disagree about navigation, selection, modals and what a back gesture does.

Make everything identical and both platforms feel slightly foreign. Let each go its own way and you get three products wearing one logo, three times the work, and drift that compounds every release.

Colour, type, spacing, elevation and motion are decided once and resolved per platform. Apple HIG, Material and web conventions become expressions of the same decision rather than three separate sets of them.

In practice: a designer settles once what "primary action, destructive" means. The platforms differ in how they show it, not in whether they agree.

A system without written rules is folklore within two quarters. The usage rules shipped beside the components — when to reach for one, when not to, what each state means.

Alongside them ran cross-platform sessions with designers and engineers, where a per-app divergence became a documented decision instead of something noticed later in review.

Invoice creation is where the product makes its money, and it was long, dense and unforgiving on a phone: line items, taxes, discounts and currencies, all calculated live.

I rebuilt it as a guided pass over one form — one prompt per empty row, in the order an invoice is actually built, with the running totals never leaving the screen.

Result: +34% completed invoices and 40% less design-to-code handoff time, because the flow was specified as states rather than screens.

I also designed the monetisation surfaces across the suite — onboarding, paywalls, subscription flows. No measured number for those; they are here as scope.

Four designers, three platforms, five products in parallel. Hiring, weekly 1:1s, written development plans, structured critique — and capacity planning, which was half the job when every product has its own release rhythm.

• The five products by name, with their install and retention numbers
• The design system as it ran across iOS, Android and web
• Store screenshots and the release cadence behind the 500K figure

It lives at alex.zhovnir.com/work/saldoapps, behind a password — client agreements, not theatre. Send me a note and I’ll open it: alex@zhovnir.com.