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Design System

Created and scaled a design system for a cohesive user experience and to decrease time-to-market by streamlining the workflow between designers, devs and internal stakeholders.

My Role
Spearheaded a cross-functional team initiative with strategic leadership
Business Outcomes
Improved team efficiency and output by 40%
User Impacts
Cohesive user experience across product, set up scalability

I led a team of designers in creating a scalable design system. This system allowed us to push strategies live to the users quickly and accurately. In addition, our design system has also been used in our product innovation incubator. Allowing us to create rapid prototypes for the market in a fast and efficient way.

Top 5 benefits of a design system:

Consistency: A design system helps maintain a consistent look and feel across different parts of a product, which enhances the overall user experience and makes the product feel more polished.

Efficiency: Design systems streamline the design and development process by providing reusable components, styles, and guidelines. This reduces redundancy, saves time, and lowers development costs.

Scalability: As a product grows and evolves, a design system allows for easy scalability. New features, modules, or pages can be designed and developed using existing components and guidelines.

Faster Development: By providing pre-built UI components and design patterns, a design system accelerates the development process, making it faster to bring new features or updates to the product.

Better User Experience: A consistent and well-thought-out design system leads to a better user experience, as users can easily understand and navigate the product. This can result in higher user satisfaction and retention.

Wireframes and skeleton components that we repurpose throughout the app

Our team conducted user research to understand the target users, their needs, pain points, and goals when using the app. Methods could include surveys, interviews, usability testing etc. From that information we then analyzed the research findings to identify key user flows, major features, and functionality required in the app. We then created an IA to structure the content and features based in a way that was scalable.

Color, typography and interactive elements

Next, my team defined the visual language and style guide including color palette, typography, iconography, imagery, illustrations, and UI elements like buttons, inputs, lists etc. In addition, we also set this language as variables and tokens, allowing us to change the themes quickly and in a scalable way.

Within Figma, creating tokens and variables for themes

Once the visual language was defined we transferred that onto our core UI components such as cards, navigations, notifications, and CTAs across the user flows.

By now having all our screens in one system we were able to conduct usability testing and identify issues throughout the UX.

Examples of the final screens

The Design System consisted of:  

  • On-Screen annotations (how we document and layout each component within the library)
  • Branding (colors, typography
  • Personas
  • Ready for Dev File
  • Prototypes
  • State changes
  • Break Points


I worked with Julie for 2-3 years at AdAction as an Associate Product Designer/Visual Designer. Julie was an amazing director and a creative mentor. She gave me valuable feedback, guidance, and support, always encouraging me to learn and grow. Her focus on collaboration, creativity, and innovation had a big impact on me and truly made me a better designer. Julie is the reason I got into Product Design, and why I’ve been able to succeed in my career. She gives her 100%! Any team would be lucky to have her.
Maria D Product Designer, AdAction
I worked closely with Julie for 3+ years at AdAction while I was Director of SEO. As Design Director, Julie led our UX/UI team with exceptional skill. She combines creative talent with practical execution, consistently delivering innovative, data-driven designs that meet both user needs and business goals. Julie excels at collaboration, working seamlessly with Product and Engineering teams. Her leadership fosters creativity and high performance in her team. I highly recommend Julie for UX/UI design leadership roles. Her skills, user empathy, and team-oriented approach would be invaluable to any organization.
Nick W: Director of SEO
Julie is an absolute pleasure to work with. She is extremely talented and her work ethic is second to none. Her ability to gather customer requirements and ideas and distill them into a presentable, compelling media is truly impressive. It would be a privilege to work with Julie again in the future and I hope I have the opportunity to do so.

Elliott FergusonVP, Professional Services, Boundless
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