Contribution

Content Design

I established Product Content Design in the Visa Product Design System, which formalized the practice at Visa with a clear set of global product standards for product content. Thus began the content style guide v1 from an outline in Word, to a single Figma file, to a more sophisticated set of guidelines in Figma, then an internal web site, and finally a publicly available site and an open source fully-fledged content design system within VPDS. The content guidelines set the standard for active, readable, and human content in Visa product experiences. As we hired more content designers to the team, the content expertise hasn’t stopped making contributions and impact to the system—we began working our magic across all facets of the design system from base elements (foundations), to components, to patterns, to codebase and code library sites, and down to the code itself. We spun up an effort to drive consistency in the language used across all 40+ of our components that exist in our 4 frameworks (React, Angular, HTML/CSS, and Flutter).

Guidance

When I came to the VPDS team in 2021, I rolled up my sleeves establishing content guidance and the content design practice at Visa and began hiring a team in late 2022. While all guidance pages have had some level of authorship, maintenance, and curation by the content design team, here is a short list of guidance pages that were primarily authored by the content design team under my leadership:

• Accessibility

• Accessible text

• Design principles

• Feedback and status

• Grammar and punctuation

• Inclusive Design

• Inclusive language

• Information architecture

• Messaging

• Placeholder text

• Readability

• Voice and tone

We worked with SMEs across the business and were influenced by our competitor’s design systems. We then tailored these concepts for Visa and the payments industry.

VPDS Nova

When I arrived on the scene, it was clearly time that the Design System needed to release a new version, and corresponding version name and naming strategy. There had been significant updates in the guidance and improvement in the look and feel and functionality of nearly all the components, with additions in the sheer number of components. We also added an entire library of our components in a new framework (HTML/CSS). The prior versions had seemingly no cohesion in terms of naming pattern. I lead a massive effort including some competitive research, several facilitated workshop sessions, and voting to align on a new version name and strategy. We looked at 36 other company’s design system names and versioning strategies and generated 187 name ideas. We aligned on a top design system name (simply Visa Design System—I’m still looking to drop the “Product”) and a version name through several rounds of voting.

Since Visa’s purpose is to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid, we creatively imagined that “everywhere” spanned beyond earth. Thus, its newest version, Nova, was born out of the cosmos! A nova is a transient astronomical event that causes the sudden appearance of a bright, apparently "new" star, that slowly fades over several weeks or many months to its original state. It’s an outburst produced by a thermonuclear explosion on the surface of a white dwarf star, the dense remnant of a Sun-like star, ejecting energy, gas, and elements like iron, calcium, and oxygen into space to help form new stars and planets.

Like a blast of cosmic material into space, the VPDS team is innovating and absorbing the complexity for our users, radiating our reusable components, code, and more across Visa. This is allowing teams to use the energy we’ve created and save their own!

VPDS Home Experience

In order to improve findability for designers and developers at Visa and mature our program, the team needed one centralized place to access VPDS. Findability had been the top user need and pain point which regularly came up in user research interviews and surveys. Our hypothesis was that to resolve this for users, we should merge together the ecosystem that was formed by all the disparate design system digital properties. The design system was living in Invision initially, and then Figma files, and 4 different code libraries, each of which lacked consistency and a common “front door.” I had worked with Carbon developers during my time at IBM, and we looked at Carbon, Material, and Atlassian as inspirational companies a bit farther along in their design system journeys to help shape our strategy.

At the time I started, I recognized this need and took charge. I knew next to nothing about using the Visa Design System, so I made a horribly janky “below-fi” set of prototypes to illustrate a centralized VPDS home experience concept, cobbling together literal junk within Figma. However, much to my surprise, the design leadership took note and started building the site using our design system components and style. We formalized this into a work stream that became an internal site, and later, the public site. When I departed the team to move to another product space, my singular wish was to ensure this work stream lived on. And it has, with spectacular result! The moral of the story is that even if your execution might be shit, proceed without fear anyway. Content Designers can and should prototype and generate ideas. Great ideas and momentum can come from anyone on the team.

Communications

When I previously worked in the Design Program Office at IBM, I was running email communications to hundreds of thousands of internal employees and leading design projects involving vast audiences. I also worked as a content marketer in the IBM Marketing organization for 4 years. So when I came to Visa, I immediately identified a need for greater communication and visibility among VPDS’s internal users. We formalized a new work stream which included a regular drumbeat of release and update emails, release blogs, and quarterly shareouts. We also established an educational series to enable our users. We grew the internal audience on our Teams channel by over 300 members in a matter of 4 months. It has since skyrocketed in popularity with our efforts and has grown by the thousands to include designers, developers, product partners, and beyond.

Management

My career at Visa established my journey as a people manager, which is the most rewarding part of the job. I continue to people manage the content designers that support VPDS. I take a team-focused leadership approach and believe that great contribution can come from any discipline at any level. I am here to support my team, unblock issues, and provide resources and recommend ways to promote long-term career growth.

Impact

Visa Product Design System exists, along with all design systems, at the highest level to support design ROI. Data shows again and again, that the most design-forward companies are the most profitable; with higher revenue and shareholder returns. Designers and developers on product teams can yield rewards in the form of hundreds of hours of efficiency savings, especially in the time saved from rework. Designers avoid redesigning components over and over, and developers can avoid re-coding the same components again and again. VPDS drives consistency, quality, and alignment to brand. It also drives greater alignment to WCAG (Accessibility) standards. Content design specifically contributes to Design ROI and has had earth-shattering impact on the Visa Product Design System; helping the design system go public, boosting quality continuously, expanding visibility and reach, and driving consistency and trust from guidance to code.