Built to be used
without me.

The insight was not complicated. A structured Figma file, built on the same logic as the design system, could give customers a hands-on way to see and configure the product in their own brand. Colors, typography, button shapes, corner radius, hover states: all adjustable, no engineering involved, no design team required for every iteration.

Figma Configurator v1

It worked in two modes. If the customer had a design team, they got access to the file and configured it themselves. If they did not, IDnow's team configured it based on their existing app.

Either way, the output was a clickable happy-path prototype showing exactly how the SDK would integrate into their product, in their branding, before a single line of code was written.

The token architecture made this possible. The design system used design tokens (named values for colors, spacing, radius, typography) as the single source of truth. The configurator file was built on those same tokens. Change a token, and the prototype updates everywhere.

Zoom changing colors on v1

The system served 17 languages, two platforms, and the entire white-label product line.

Our team was me as designer, a Software Engineer, a Software Architect, and the Technical Lead from the core platform team. Ciprian Bostan, Maxwell Anipah, Dmitry Simonov and I mapped the problem together, built out the solution concept, and partially implemented it.

The developers did not need convincing. Manual configuration was draining engineering hours on every single onboarding, not just the big ones. The problem was theirs too. We placed third at the hackathon.

Aug 2020: The hackathon team building the proof of concept.

Two months later, the first Figma configurator took shape. The core design decision was the same as in the hackathon: abstract the complexity. Customers should never see a config key. They should see a color picker, a preview that updates as they change things.

Version one, in October 2020, covered core branding. In March 2021 I took the token work further for AutoIdent WEB — the same screens, with the media and breakpoints swapped for the web platform. The second configurator, in May 2022, added more granular controls (secondary color palettes, font weight overrides, more precise radius options) and reached beyond design to serve the sales and customer success teams directly. Each version reflected what the business team learned trying to use the previous one.

May 2022: Figma Configurator v2

I ran two to three workshops for three to four members of the business team, teaching them how to edit the Figma files, apply a customer's brand, and understand the structure well enough to prepare their own sales demos.

The goal was concrete: they needed to be able to do this on a Tuesday afternoon without putting a ticket in a design queue.

A tool that only a designer can operate is a dependency, not a solution. That distinction mattered here. That distinction mattered here. The business team was not a department that should be blocked on design for every customer call.

After the workshops, they were not. They ran their own demos. They prepared their own customer configurations. They understood what they were changing and why.

Each version of the configurator took one week to build. With what I know now and current tooling, I could build the same thing in a couple of days. That does not change what it did then. It does make me think about every other process inside a company that is silently draining 200 hours because nobody has stopped to ask the right question.

The question I asked in that sales team call was not "how do we fix the design process?" It was "where is this actually costing you?" The answer was not where anyone expected it. That is still the question I ask first.