Digital Product Manager, Design Ops · Southwest Airlines
Native App Homepage
The native app homepage redesign marked a significant expansion of the Heart Design System's reach — from web into Southwest's iOS and Android native apps. Moving a design system from web to native is not a straight translation, and this project was the first time the Design Ops team and the native app teams worked through those differences at scale in production.
Context
Southwest's native apps are a primary touchpoint for day-of-travel customers. The homepage is the first thing members see when they open the app — and before this project, it operated largely independent of HDS, with its own visual decisions and component patterns developed separately from the web system.
Translating HDS to native
Design systems built for the web don't port directly to native. Interaction patterns, platform conventions (iOS HIG, Material Design), and performance constraints all differ. The team had to work through what HDS could offer directly, what needed platform-specific adaptation, and what new native patterns needed to be established from scratch. The native app homepage became the first surface where those decisions were made in earnest and shipped as production native code for both iOS and Android.
What this unlocked
Getting HDS into the native apps required close collaboration between design, iOS engineers, and Android engineers to establish component equivalents in native code. The work produced the first set of HDS-native components — a foundation that subsequent native projects at Southwest can build from rather than starting from scratch.
Outcome
The 2024 native app homepage established HDS's footprint in the native product for the first time. It gave the team a working model for native adoption and a playbook other teams have since built from.