A single source of truth for all digital channels & business units
Walgreens is a major healthcare and pharmacy retailer that partnered with Publicis Sapient to create a cohesive design system serving as a single source of truth across its digital touchpoints: web, mobile app, and kiosks.
Agency
Publicis Sapient
Duration
5 months (2022-2023)
My role
Sr. UI/UX Designer (Design systems)
Team
1 ACD, 1 Design Lead, 2 Jr. Designers
The challenge
Walgreens was managing its digital ecosystem across more than five different tools and implementation practices. The result was technical debt, design inconsistencies, and governance issues that made it difficult to scale. A unified design system was needed to bring consistency, efficiency, and structure to the organization’s digital transformation.
My role
This was my first experience building a design system from the ground up for a large organization. As a UI/UX designer embedded in a cross-functional team, I worked closely with experience designers, client stakeholders, a project manager, and developers.
My primary focus was components and documentation – I delivered 67 components, both net new and enhanced, and owned the deep-dive analysis of existing elements to identify opportunities to simplify, consolidate, and scale. I also mentored junior designers, guiding them as they built confidence and contributed to the system.
The solution
When I joined, our design leads had completed a gap analysis of the existing Living Style Guide and design libraries across platforms, auditing 39 foundational styles and components and surfacing inconsistencies and opportunities for improvement.
From there, the team built a scalable design system on an atomic design framework, aligned with the organization’s move to AEM. The result was unified styles, accessibility-compliant components, comprehensive documentation, and integrated tooling that gave Walgreens a reliable, governed single source of truth.
Fundamentals & Tokens
The existing design fundamentals lacked detailed documentation and were inconsistent between the live site and design files. We enhanced core fundamentals across all digital touchpoints – color, grid, spacing, typography, and icons – to establish a scalable, consistent foundation.
We also integrated design tokens using the Figma Design Tokens plugin, storing values in JSON format. This enabled efficient cross-platform updates and made visual consistency easier to maintain and govern over time.
Components
For each of the 67 components I worked on, I thoroughly analyzed UI, behavior, variations, states, light and dark themes, usage, alignment, layout, spacing, and mobile parity. More complex components like Swatches required competitive benchmarking and UX research to ensure best practices for usability and accessibility. Where available, I leveraged existing user research from the Walgreens team to keep decisions grounded in data.
3. Documentation & Guidelines
After components were built, documentation became the majority of my work – and for good reason. A component is only as useful as the guidance around it. For each of the 67 components, I wrote clear usage guidelines, documented behavior and variations, and included accessibility annotations so developers had everything they needed to implement correctly.
Accessibility
Accessibility wasn’t an afterthought. I collaborated with accessibility experts from both Publicis Sapient and Walgreens to ensure every component met WCAG 2.1 guidelines. This included detailed accessibility reviews, annotating ARIA attributes, and specifying screen reader interactions to help the development team build inclusive experiences from the start.
Tools ecosystem
To eliminate the manual effort of keeping design and code in sync, our experience and development teams proposed an integrated tool stack that made the design system easier to govern, adopt, and operationalize at scale.
Reflections
Although the project ended earlier than expected, it sparked a genuine passion for design systems and accessibility. Building a great design system is not easy, but I came away believing it’s one of the most impactful things a designer can contribute to. It creates the foundation that every digital experience is built on. I also deepened my commitment to inclusive design through this work: building accessibly isn’t optional; it’s how we make sure everyone, regardless of ability, has equal access to the experience.