Building unifyUX: Rebranding 250+ Products in One Year

The Challenge

In March 2023, PerkinElmer completed its divestiture, spinning off its Life Sciences and Diagnostics business. What remained had eight weeks to become Revvity—a new company with a new name, new brand, and a legal mandate: remove all PerkinElmer branding within one year.

The catch? We didn't even know how many products we had.

What we discovered was staggering: over 200 software applications, 50+ hardware instrument lines, countless reagent packages, and emerging AI systems—all needing coordinated rebranding across global teams in multiple time zones.

This wasn't just a rebrand. It was an opportunity to build something that had never existed: a unified design system that could serve the unique needs of life sciences products while documenting how teams actually work together to build customer-centered products.

Why This Design System is Different

Product-Centric Organization

Most design systems organize by component type—buttons, forms, navigation. UnifyUX organizes by product type: Hardware, Software, Reagents, and AI Systems. Why? Because a microplate reader has fundamentally different interaction patterns than a cloud-based genomics platform.

This component represents a physical microplate used in laboratory diagnostics. The design system doesn't just provide the visual component—it explains the scientific context, usage patterns, and how the digital representation should mirror the physical object scientists already know.

Research-Driven Priorities

We didn't build what we thought teams needed. We built what they actually asked for. Every guideline prioritization came from real questions posed by product teams.

Our recommendations synthesized:

• Primary research: User testing, surveys, customer workflows
• Secondary research: Competitive analysis, ISO standards, WCAG guidelines, research publications
• Communities of practice: Industry standards specific to life sciences

This evidence-based approach meant every design decision could be defended with data, not opinions.

We used a prioritization framework to determine what to build first: Quick Wins (high customer value, low development effort) got immediate attention, while Time Sinks (low value, high effort) were explicitly labeled "do not do." This transparent prioritization helped teams understand not just what to build, but why—and what intentionally wasn't being built.

The Team Design Process

The design system became more than visual guidelines—it documented how teams should work together. We captured processes that actually work for customer-centered product development:

• Jobs to be done framework for understanding user needs
• Collaborative design workshops for cross-functional alignment
• Evidence-based decision making with shared research repositories
• Iterative validation through customer feedback loops

This process documentation was critical because teams weren't just adopting new visual styles—they were adopting new ways of working.

The Scale of Coordination

Hardware Products

Hardware guidelines defined a consistent design language across physical instruments—simplified silhouettes, rounded edges for small products, distinct visual emphasis on the black horizontal base and white upper body. Every product, from desktop instruments to large floor-standing systems, followed this visual system.

Software Applications

Software guidelines provided production-ready patterns. The sign-in foundation shows the level of detail: authentication flows, password recovery, modal behavior, product logo placement—everything a team needs to implement correctly the first time.

Reagents & End-to-End Workflows

Life sciences products often combine hardware, software, and reagents into complete workflows. The design system documented these end-to-end experiences: how reagent storage connects to software setup, how instruments scan barcodes to access digital information, how reports are generated from protocols.

Measuring Adoption

We didn't just hope teams would adopt the design system—we built frameworks to measure and guide adoption.

The Maturity Model

The five-level maturity model gave teams a clear path:

• Level 0 (Legal): Replace PerkinElmer branding
• Level 1 (Bronze): Color updates, basic branding
• Level 2 (Silver): UnifyUX components and libraries
• Level 3 (Gold): Accessibility, user research, dedicated UX
• Level 4 (Platinum): Full product ownership, design system contribution

This model helped teams understand their current state and plan their journey, while giving leadership visibility into progress across the portfolio.

Investment Prioritization

Not every product deserved the same investment. The matrix combined Product Life Cycle Stage (Unreleased, New, Established, Legacy) with Investment Profile (High, Medium, Sustaining, None/Low) to provide clear guidance:

• Must: High-investment new products
• Should: New products with medium investment, established products with high investment
• Could: Products where investment might make sense
• Unlikely/Avoid: Don't waste resources here

This framework prevented the common trap of trying to upgrade every product equally. Legacy products with low investment? Avoid major redesigns. New high-investment products? They must adopt unifyUX from day one.

The Process

Cross-Functional Partnership

Having a focused leadership team was critical to success. With dedicated leadership in Design Operations and Research, we could move quickly while maintaining quality. The core global UX team coordinated across time zones, established shared processes, and ensured consistent execution.

Success required true collaboration between design, engineering, product, and science teams. We established:

• Weekly design critiques with open attendance
• Bi-weekly component reviews between design and engineering
• Monthly product showcases where teams shared adoption progress
• Quarterly planning sessions for roadmap alignment

Rapid Prototyping

This quarter, we rebranded 26 of 30 components (87%) in just 8 weeks—that's 3.7 components per week. Even while rebranding at this pace, we added 6 new components, representing a 20% increase in the design system size. This demonstrates that rapid iteration doesn't mean stagnation—the system continued evolving to meet new needs.

With the deadline looming, we couldn't afford perfection. We adopted a "ship and iterate" mentality:

1. Document the question teams were asking
2. Research the answer with users and industry standards
3. Prototype quickly in Figma and code
4. Test with one team as early adopters
5. Refine and publish based on real usage

This cycle took days or weeks, not months.

Implementation Partners

Rather than mandating adoption, we found champions in each product team. These "implementation partners" adopted unifyUX first, provided feedback, and became advocates within their organizations. The transformation was dramatic: legacy PerkinElmer interfaces with dated visual design and clunky controls evolved into modern, streamlined Revvity experiences with improved information architecture, consistent components, and better usability. Their success stories motivated others.

The Impact

Tracking Progress Across the Portfolio

With over 100+ products across three business segments, we built comprehensive dashboards to track rebranding progress in real-time. These dashboards gave complete visibility into status, risk, and UX maturity levels across the entire product portfolio.

The detailed Life Sciences dashboard tracked customer-facing software products through their rebranding journey, showing release status, risk assessment, and UX maturity progression from basic legal branding (Level 0) through Bronze (Level 1) and Silver (Level 2) implementations. Products were categorized and tracked individually, ensuring nothing fell through the cracks.

The portfolio-wide dashboard aggregated progress across all three business segments—Diagnostics, Life Sciences, and Revvity Signals. This executive view showed how many products met legal requirements, how many were released, and which were at risk, enabling proactive intervention when teams needed support.

Measurable Benefits

After implementing unifyUX, our teams saw benefits inline with industry averages for design systems. Industry research shows that design systems typically deliver development time reductions of 30-47%, with teams working 31-38% more efficiently (Zeroheight, George Barbu).

Our teams experienced similar gains:

• Faster Development: Reusable components and clear patterns meant UI work that previously took weeks now took days
• Consistent Quality: Accessibility and usability standards were built into every component, ensuring quality across all products
• Better Collaboration: The shared design language improved communication between design, engineering, and product teams

Customer Impact

Most importantly, the consistent experience across products helped scientists work more efficiently. They could switch between instruments and software with less cognitive load, focusing on their research rather than relearning interfaces.

The May 2023 brand launch brought together hundreds of employees globally to unveil the Revvity name and vision—the culmination of eight intense weeks of transformation.

The new Revvity brand came to life across office spaces, with the distinctive visual identity creating a sense of energy and forward momentum.

The Learnings

Start with Research

Don't assume you know what teams need. We asked teams what questions they had, then prioritized documentation based on demand. The most-asked questions became the first guidelines.

Document Collaboration, Not Just Components

A design system isn't just code and Figma files—it's how teams work together. Documenting processes like the jobs-to-be-done framework and prioritization matrices gave teams a shared methodology.

Make Adoption Measurable

The maturity model gave teams a roadmap and leadership visibility. Without clear levels and metrics, adoption would have been invisible and motivation would have suffered.

Tailor to Your Domain

Generic design systems miss domain-specific needs. UnifyUX's product-centric organization—Hardware, Software, Reagents, AI Systems—reflected the actual product portfolio, making it immediately relevant to teams.

Balance Speed with Quality

The legal deadline forced rapid iteration, but we didn't sacrifice research. Every guideline was evidence-based, even if the evidence collection was compressed.

The Future

UnifyUX continues to evolve with a strategic mindset connecting product development to market needs. Our roadmap focuses on five key initiatives:

1. Evolution of Revvity products - Continuous improvement of existing product lines
2. AI empowering employees and customers - Integrating AI capabilities across the platform
3. Customer/user centered design realized - Deepening research-driven development practices
4. Innovate on delivery, velocity, innovation - Accelerating time-to-market while maintaining quality
5. Power of cross-functional teams - Strengthening collaboration between disciplines

Current technical initiatives include:

• Advanced component library with AI-specific patterns
• Localization guidelines for global markets
• Enhanced accessibility beyond WCAG compliance
• Design tokens 2.0 with semantic naming
• Contribution model for teams to submit patterns

Building Together

The core global UX leadership team: Maria Ralph (Research Lead), Sharath Sundar (Design Operations Lead), and Mike Wilson (Design System Lead). This was a true team effort—we came together during an incredibly intense transformation and built something lasting.

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What made this transformation even more remarkable: we executed it entirely with University of Waterloo coop students rotating through the program every four months. These students didn't just contribute—they led product redesigns, conducted user research, and became full partners in the transformation.

Coop students worked directly with laboratory instruments and scientists, redesigning product interfaces as part of the unifyUX design system implementation. Learn more about University of Waterloo's coop program.

The rotating coop model brought continuous fresh perspectives. Every four months, new designers joined with different skills, different questions, and different approaches. This constant renewal prevented groupthink and kept the design system evolving. Students brought academic rigor, eagerness to learn life sciences domain knowledge, and fearlessness in challenging assumptions.

The unifyUX design system wasn't built by a central team and handed down—it was built with product teams, informed by research, validated by customers, and constrained by an impossible deadline.

We coordinated globally across hundreds of products, documented not just what to build but how to work together, and met the legal mandate. But more than that, we created a foundation for better products and more effective teams.

The rebrand was just the beginning. The design system is the future.

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Want to explore unifyUX? Visit revvity.design to see the full design system in action.