Building Design Systems for Regulated Industries

In healthcare and other regulated industries, design systems can’t just scale—they must comply. Every component, color, and interaction carries both a brand and a legal implication. Designing for this environment means balancing creativity with governance, speed with safety, and usability with trust.

Why Compliance Shapes Design

In consumer tech, a design system might exist to ensure consistency and velocity. In healthcare, it must also protect patients and clinicians. Accessibility, privacy, and auditability are not nice-to-haves—they’re product requirements. A compliant design system reduces risk while ensuring every experience feels human and coherent across the ecosystem.

Foundations of a Regulated Design System

• Accessibility first: Every component starts WCAG-compliant and is tested for keyboard navigation, contrast, and screen-reader behavior.
• Design tokens as policy: Tokens are not just style variables—they encode compliance. For example, color palettes that meet minimum contrast ratios or spacing tokens that align with FDA display guidance.
• Component governance: Each component has a documented“source of truth” with usage guidance, version history, and validation status for regulated review.
• Cross-functional sign-off: Legal, clinical, and engineering teams review system updates just as they would product releases, ensuring accountability and traceability.

Designing for Both Scale and Safety

At Curie AI, we built a design library that balanced rapid iteration with HIPAA-grade responsibility. Figma served as our shared canvas, while documentation in Notion and automated QA scripts in Storybook enforced consistency. Our clinicians could trust that every chart color, alert tone, and typography choice met both accessibility and medical-device readability standards.

The result was more than reusable UI—it was a shared language between designers, engineers, and regulators. When compliance is baked into design decisions, teams spend less time defending pixels and more time improving patient care.

Lessons Learned

• Build transparency into your process. Regulators and auditors should be able to trace why a design decision was made.
• Automate what you can, document what you must. Use linting, accessibility tests, and visual regression tools to prevent errors before they become violations.
• Design for trust. The visual language of compliance— calm colors, clear hierarchy, predictable motion—helps users feel confident when stakes are high.

Closing Thought

In regulated spaces, design systems are living proof that good design is disciplined design. They turn compliance from a constraint into a catalyst—allowing innovation to move fast, responsibly.