Kristine L. Watkins

Enterprise Design Systems Strategy

Company: Vanguard is a global investment management company with headquarters in the U.S., founded in 1975 with over $10.4 trillion in assets under management.

Objective: An enterprise design system would enhance modernization in digital platforms across investor services, web/mobile applications, and internal tools. It would create a unified design approach for product, engineering, marketing, and customer experience teams. Additionally, design systems support agile product development and cohesive user experience across multiple investment product lines. This reduces design/development redundancies and allows for rapid experimentation and enables more strategic and product-specific solutions. (2022-2024)

UX challenges

Taking an iterative and thoughtful approach to building and maintaining a design system so that it represents the digital manifestation of the brand, meets the needs of every adopting team, and is usable and accessible for the user experience.

UX solutions

Let's talk about design systems and their beautiful evolution. Picture this: it all starts with a small, passionate team crafting core components to showcase what's possible. They're laying the groundwork with essential UI elements - the building blocks that will shape every digital interaction.

Then magic happens. As teams catch the vision, that initial concept blossoms into something bigger. We're talking a rich component library backed by clear documentation that gets everyone speaking the same design language.

Here's where it gets really exciting. The system grows more sophisticated through real-world use and feedback. Product teams contribute insights that refine and expand our design tools. We're not just building components anymore - we're crafting a strategic foundation for incredible digital experiences.

Watch as teams embrace this new way of working. What started as an experiment becomes essential infrastructure. There's less friction, more innovation, and digital products that truly shine. The design system evolves into a living framework that captures your organization's unique perspective and approach.

At its peak, a mature design system is transformative. It creates harmony across the organization through shared understanding and tools. Teams iterate faster, experiences become more consistent, and the whole process of building digital products just flows better. With each iteration, the system grows stronger, documentation gets clearer, and teams work together more seamlessly. Take a deeper dive in the Design Systems section of my portfolio.

UX challenges

Taking a brochure site and recoding it to be a fully responsive, optimized for search, and the largest power-marketing tool for the company required careful planning. As digital marketing became more of a priority, so did proving conversions. BAYADA needed a site that would target the right audience at the right time in their buyer journey, and then be able to "close the loop" as we called it. Meaning - being able to show that visitors converted to customers. Content needed to include keywords, proper metadata, and fast page load speed to boost SEO. This was in the midst of "Mobilegeddon" by google, when mobile-friendly sites would get preference.

UX solutions

This was an incredible opportunity to do things right. As a leader, I considered hand-coded HTML, WordPress, or HubSpot for the full responsive conversion. After cost/benefit and effort/impact analyses, I decided hand-coding HTML and CSS would allow us to own the content and the hosting server to have more flexibility. A Content Optimization System (COS) would prove to be more valuable for landing pages once our digital marketing efforts stabilized.

At the same time, the public site was due for a server upgrade. It was perfect timing and it further proved the decision to code and host our own sites was the right one. After working with IT, my team and I planned and implemented the best systems structure to compliment the new site. This included establishing 301 permanent redirects, changing the file naming structure for SEO and sustainability purposes, and eliminating duplicative content. Page load speed decreased through caching and minifying files. Through it all, one of the biggest opportunities was to make the site fully accessible. Being ability-aware during the rebuild boosted SEO and allowed the information to be more easily accessed by everyone.

Tracking leads was accomplished through the use of forms. Once a visitor supplied their name, my team manually matched leads with new customers. This manual effort was worth it because we were able to confidently prove conversion rate. Vanity URLs and specific 800 numbers were used to track paid advertising click-throughs and phone calls, thus providing value in digital marketing spending. A full content overhaul took place to include the Inbound methodology, by providing valuable content to draw users in, and continue to display fresh content to keep them coming back. An Ecosystem Site Map was created to see all of the sites connected to bayada.com to ensure nothing was missed. Finally, new features included chat and feedback functionality on every page. Visits and conversions continued to increase quarter over quarter, and the responsive redesign of the website became the number one marketing tool for the company.