Chippocalypse — My Chips Redesign Adventure

It’s a story, not a case study

4 min readApr 4, 2024

Back in 2021, I was working on a project at my previous company Draup, a B2B platform with tons of data and insights. We had a lot of visualizations, and it was exciting to see how that data dump could look so beautiful.

One component that was used a lot to visualize this data was “CHIPS”

They were everywhere. Some chips on some pages were clickable, and that same chip design was not clickable on others. It was confusing 🫤. We also had two different ways to represent High, Medium, and Low levels

Now, in the world of potato chips, different shapes, colours and flavours are welcome. Every chip can be unique. ;p

But when it comes to UX Design, you don’t want your chips to have quite so much diversity.

We had a problem with the consistency. And I had to tackle this, as my project involved a lot of chips. The new designer I had become was determined to solve this once and for all.

Why does consistency matter so much? (Especially for B2B)

Speed things up: Goodbye reinventing the wheel! Designers and devs can build stuff faster with ready-made pieces.
Easy peasy for users: A consistent interface is a happy interface- users don’t have to learn how it works on every page.
Teamwork makes the dream work: Everyone’s speaking the same design language, so building and updating the platform is smoother.

Taming the Chippocalypse: Making Sense of the Mess

First things first — gotta understand how the system works across the platform. I grabbed screenshots, made notes on where these rogue chips were hanging out, and figured out what made them all so different.

Here’s the scoop:

Click This, Not That: My Initial Plan

Inspired by this tag design,

I proposed a plan where Clickability was the first level differentiator. I considered the “High/Medium/Low” attribute a second priority. It seemed logical to me.

When i saw this comparison of how our page looked. I was like this is the one, I have cracked it. It looks so much cleaner.

Until I took it to the stakeholders.

Consulting the Wise Ones (and Changing Course)

When I bounced my clickability-first idea off the senior designers and product owners, they agreed it looked neater.

But i was missing the point: for Draup, users relied heavily on understanding data through High/Medium/Low (HML) distinctions, which in my proposed solution were not coming out.