Company
Awell Health
Role
Lead Product Designer
Year
2024
When I joined Awell, our product had outgrown the UI framework it was built on. We were still using MUI v5, and it showed—slow to work with, hard to customize, and visually stale. As the only product designer, I decided to rebuild the foundation from scratch. That’s how Turtle UI was born—a custom design system made to move fast, look sharp, and finally get out of developers’ way.
The Problem
We were stuck with MUI v5. It slowed devs down, bloated the codebase, and made the product feel like a patched-up dashboard template. Every new component came with five layers of overrides and a side of frustration. Visually, it didn’t match the quality of what we were building.
What I Did
As the only product designer at Awell, I built Turtle UI—a custom component library designed to replace MUI and give our product a UI system that actually made sense.
I focused on:
Rebuilding our components to be lightweight, opinionated, and easy to drop in
Removing unnecessary complexity so devs could move fast without fighting the system
Creating a clean, consistent visual language that made the app feel designed, not just assembled
Aligning design and development without relying on endless documentation or Slack threads
No theming. No fluff. Just a practical system that worked out of the box.
The Result
Faster development, fewer overrides, less guesswork
Cleaner, sharper UI that matched our product’s level of maturity
A well-defined, modern component system that elevated the user experience—and the team’s confidence in building
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