Situation
During my tenure at Caterpillar, I was responsible for leading the vision and strategy for a set of marketing technologies, including the Adobe Experience Cloud infrastructure. Over the years, ad-hoc front-end design and development practices had accumulated significant UX and technical debt, resulting in complex codebases, inconsistent designs, and increased maintenance costs. An overhaul of the front-end framework was necessary to offer more flexibility and creativity to content creators while reducing development complexity and support costs.
Challenges
- Front-End Code Complexity:
- Multiple codebases with no common library of web elements and styles.
- Poorly organized cascading styles and JavaScript libraries.
- Hundreds of redundant templates and components.
- Custom-coded elements used instead of the platform’s native capabilities.
- Design to Development Complexity:
- Time-consuming design and prototyping processes due to recreated elements.
- Inconsistent designs and UI elements.
- Misalignment between final design assets and legacy code, complicating integration.
- Large Design & Development Team:
- Varied approaches to solutions among multiple designers, developers, and strategists.
- Frequent recreation of elements from scratch.
- Varied Business Needs:
- Diverse requirements across hundreds of websites and different companies.
Actions
To address these challenges, I led the effort to overhaul the front-end framework and develop a design system that catered to existing designs and new features:
- Needs Analysis:
- Evangelized the need and benefits of a design system throughout the organization.
- Conducted a technical assessment to reveal the scale of the challenge.
- Collaborated with teams to evaluate strategic options for addressing the issues.
- Strategy & Design:
- Defined common use cases for templates and components across sites.
- Developed a strategy for streamlining and consolidating existing web elements.
- Worked with design teams to create a new design system using graphic files, live front-end code, and best practices.
- Development:
- Collaborated with the platform team on a plan to integrate new front-end code into the existing legacy system.
Results
This comprehensive overhaul of the front-end framework and the introduction of a multi-site design system significantly improved Caterpillar’s digital capabilities, ensuring a consistent and high-quality user experience across its extensive web presence.
- Design:
- Improved the speed and quality of designs.
- Introduced rapid prototyping to test multiple concepts quickly.
- Enabled non-designers to plan their content.
- Achieved design consistency within the website and across other company channels and websites.
- Development:
- Created future-proof, extensible code that is easier to scale.
- Streamlined development processes, reducing time and effort required for new features and enhancements.
- Collaboration:
- Provided consistent direction and guidance to multiple parties.
- Enhanced communication between designers, developers, and strategists through a common visual language.
- Costs:
- Simplified changes and enhancements, allowing for increased velocity.
- Reduced supplier costs for design and development.
- Enabled teams to repurpose time and focus on user testing and content creation.