Introducing Nebula — Jamf’s UX Design System

Nebula

Nebula is Jamf’s UX Design System, a centralized collection of reusable user interface components, patterns, visual styles and guidelines that help teams design, build, and maintain consistent user interfaces across products. Even though our design system has been around for years, in the last 12 months we have made a concerted effort to expand our available components and patterns and make them available on all the frameworks our products run on. The main driver behind this is Jamf’s overall platform first strategy, which includes ensuring our products deliver a consistent joined-up experience to both our admins and our end users. The latest version of Nebula boasts 38 components and patterns, with another 17 in the pipeline for 2025.

The Benefits of Using Nebula Across Teams

In the fast-paced world of digital product development, maintaining consistency, efficiency, and quality across multiple projects can feel like an uphill battle. But this is exactly where our investment in Nebula comes into play. By offering a unified framework of guidelines, components, and patterns, Nebula allows our teams to efficiently deliver unified, consistent and familiar end user experiences even when multiple projects are running in parallel.

A great example of this was our work on two major initiatives in 2024 called Compliance Benchmarks and Blueprints (check out the JNUC 2024 keynote for more). Whilst these two project deliveries were largely decoupled from each other, both project teams used Nebula ensuring they delivered a consistent user experience that came together brilliantly in the product.

Nebula bridges the gaps between design, engineering, and product teams. Let’s explore how it transforms workflows and outcomes across these disciplines.

A Designer’s Ally: Creativity with Structure

For our designers, Nebula is like a toolbox filled with carefully crafted tools. Instead of spending time reinventing common elements like buttons, forms, or navigation bars, our designers can focus on solving complex user problems and exploring creative solutions. This accelerates the design process while maintaining visual consistency across the product.

Consistency isn’t just about aesthetics — it’s about creating a cohesive experience for users. Nebula ensures that colors, typography, spacing, and components feel familiar, no matter where users interact with the product, or which product they are using. Moreover, Nebula incorporates accessibility guidelines, ensuring inclusivity is baked into all of our products.

Scalability is another critical advantage of using Nebula. As our products grow, adding new features or expanding to different platforms becomes easier when a consistent design foundation is already in place. For designers, this means less time spent adapting designs for new contexts and more time focused on innovation.

Engineering’s Best Friend: Reusability and Efficiency

Our engineers thrive on efficiency, and a well-implemented design system is a game-changer. By providing reusable, standardized components, the system eliminates the need to code UI elements from scratch. This not only speeds up development but also ensures consistency in how these components behave across different parts of the application.

Clean, maintainable code is another significant benefit. When engineers rely on a shared system, they follow established patterns and guidelines, reducing the risk of code bloat or fragmentation. This consistency pays off in the long run, making it easier to debug, update, or scale the product.

Nebula has also improved collaboration between our designers and engineers. With a shared understanding of how components look and function, miscommunications are minimized, and teams can work together more seamlessly. Engineers can trust that the design assets they receive are aligned with the system, and designers can be confident that their vision will be faithfully translated into code.

Empowering Product Teams: Faster, Smarter, Better

For our product development teams, time to market is a critical metric, and a design system directly impacts it. By reducing the time required to design and develop new features, teams can ship updates faster and respond to market demands with agility. This speed doesn’t come at the expense of quality -on the contrary, the system ensures that every element adheres to predefined standards of usability and performance.

A consistent design system also strengthens the user experience. Users come to trust and appreciate our products that feel familiar and intuitive across touchpoints. A cohesive interface reinforces brand identity and helps users navigate new features with ease.

Cost efficiency is a hidden but powerful advantage as well. By reducing redundancy in design and development, Jamf saves both time and resources, which can be reinvested into innovation or scaling.

The Big Picture: A Single Source of Truth

At its core, Nebula acts as a single source of truth — a framework that aligns cross-functional teams and supports the entire product lifecycle. It fosters collaboration, reduces redundant work, and helps teams create products that are not only functional but delightful and inclusive.

By embracing Nebula, Jamf empowers their teams to focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional value to users. It’s more than a set of guidelines or components — it’s the foundation of efficient, scalable, and user-centered product development.

Next steps: The Future of Nebula

Nebula, in its current form, is a very solid design system: we aim to strive higher. As any good design system should, Nebula will always be evolving and expanding. We are looking to add more components and patterns, drive adoption even higher and continuously improve the visual look and feel. This expansive approach supports our goal of creating a more streamlined end user experience across all of Jamf’s admin and end user touch points.