H1 Suite: six apps that had to feel like one product

H1 is a collaborative communication platform for organisations. It started as one app in September 2023 and was six by May 2024. H1 Communicator, a professional communication platform for corporate employees, came first. H1 Assignment is task management for workplace productivity. H1 Mail is the client email app. H1 SMS handles company messages and email from one place. H1 Register holds user management centrally for every service in the group. Alima AI is a chatbot that turns a document into something you can ask questions of.

Six separate products, used by the same employee on the same day.

My brief was to turn the platform's specifications into developer-ready designs and to set the visual direction for each app, while the platform kept adding services.

The hardest call was not inside any one app. It was across all of them: was this six projects, or one product with six doors?

I designed it as one product. H1 Register is the spine, a single account that opens every service in the group, so nobody builds a new relationship with each app. On top of that, one visual language and one component library.

The part that mattered most was repeating the patterns. A message in Mail and a message in SMS behave the same way. Learn one app and you have already learned the next. That is what makes six apps arriving in eight months read as one product, rather than six projects sharing a logo.

• H1 Mail and H1 SMS for iOS, Android and iPad, including App Store and Play Store screenshot sets.
• H1 Communicator phase two: Spaces, Groups, one-to-one chats, directory, call history and a supervision view.
• H1 Assignment (February 2024) for workplace task management, and H1 Register (April 2024), the centralised user management behind every H1 group service.
• Alima AI (May 2024): a chat-bot interface for asking your documents questions, the suite's first AI surface.
• One shared visual language across the suite: the red H1 mark, one icon set, one type scale, one component library.

Sole designer on the suite: flows, UI, component library, store assets, and handoff against the PRDs.

A component library that lives only in Figma drifts. Ours did, release by release. A design system needs a repository shared with engineering from day one.