Overview

I joined Experian remotely—during the pandemic—in 2021. I was tasked with modernizing the design of the Experian native iOS and Android apps. Fairly quickly after shipping only a handful of native app updates, we revamped our UX team to be better structured for a multi-platform app approach. In doing so, we said goodbye to some designers and expanded in other important areas rapidly. With that transition I became to Design Manager over the freshly minted Experience Architecture domain. This multi-function team focused on enabling services and shared app surfaces like dashboard, account management, and alerts. I took on more designers and worked to shape the experience across multiple business verticals.

I manage a team of 7 designers: 2 design system designers and 5 UX/UI generalists. I work with cross-functional partners to establish OKRs for the Experience Architecture domain and guide my designers as they work within their own cross-functional pods to deliver solutions.

Atlas Design System

A piece I deemed critical was to evolve our current, rough design system approach into a first-class system of components, patterns and documentation. There was little experience with design systems on our design team, and even less familiarity with how to properly govern such a system on our engineering teams. Our current system was a handful of UI rules built and delivered by an outside agency. It was not well documented. It was not well built by the latest Figma library features or guidelines.

What was a previously completely unresourced initiative, has now become a cross-fuctional team of 2 designers and 8 developers driving organization-level KPIs. We have built out processes and integrations with mulitple development frameworks and platforms, fully documented our usage guidelines and design specs in an easy-to-use monument site, and have seen adoption rates surge while clarifying developer handoff conversations minimize.