48 screens designed alone, and the 35% that changed
How I built a legal contract platform from zero, and what a design review with three developers taught me about shipping.
- Colombian legal teams typed contracts by hand: 20 minutes each and about 7 errors in critical clauses.
- I designed 48 screens over three months without talking to a developer. When three developers opened the file, 35% of it had to change.
- The product shipped, errors dropped from 7 to under 2 per contract, and it is now a standalone SaaS.
Context
Customela was born inside Joonik, a staff augmentation company in Barranquilla. The idea: let legal teams create, fill and manage contracts digitally instead of typing them in Word and chasing signatures.
In Colombia a contract carries weight. Every clause and every decimal in a financial calculation can become a liability. Teams were not just slow. They averaged 7 typing errors per contract, and each one took about 20 minutes.
The real problem
The problem was scope. The CEO wanted templates, custom contracts, variable logic, web and mobile, brand and landing page, all at once.
I spent the first month with him mapping the problem and resisting the urge to open Figma. The goal was a real MVP definition, which meant cutting things he did not want to cut.
One flow that works completely beats three that half work.
Designing alone
For three months I was the only designer and no developer had been assigned. I built the product architecture, the brand, 48 screens, a design system from scratch and the landing page.
I tested what I could. Card sorting narrowed the variables to 7 types. Tree testing proved people could find clauses. First-click testing turned the variable modal into something closer to a form than to code.
The review
Three months in, three developers opened my Figma file. Three problems came up at once: the back-end logic was far heavier than the screens suggested, I had not handled responsive layouts, and my animations were expensive to build.
We audited everything and took two options to the CEO: build it all as designed, or ship one complete flow and iterate. It took three separate conversations. We chose the second.
What shipped
A two-layer system. Field agents filled contracts with error-proof forms. Senior lawyers built smart templates with their own logic, without code.
The web MVP launched at 65% fidelity to the Figma. The iOS app came after, dark mode came after that, and Android did not make the timeline. In total the product grew to about 70 screens.
Results
Customela started inside Joonik and now runs as an independent product.
Where I fell short
I designed for three months with no developer input. They had not been assigned yet, but I could have asked the CEO for one developer in the architecture conversations. I did not, and a third of my work changed.
Quality assurance suffered too: I was designing the mobile app and supervising another project at the same time. Joonik then assigned a second designer.
What I changed
I made one rule: never design more than one sprint ahead without a developer in the room. For the mobile app we adopted MUI as a shared foundation and I consulted the developers while designing, and that app shipped with much tighter alignment.
That rule is why I now sit in both the marketing and the development meetings from day one.
Founding Product Designer in Barranquilla. I design and build with early-stage founders. More about me →