Creating the NCR Design System

Using product strategies and design thinking to drive efficiency and value at NCR

At NCR, I led the strategic vision, team development, and execution of the NCR Design System.


The design system enhanced efficiency and user experience across commerce and digital banking SaaS B2E, B2B, and B2C products.


The pandemic had a deep resonating effect on NCR’s business and NCR's customers’ businesses. NCR creates SaaS products for customers in commerce and digital banking industries, with a focus on retail stores, restaurants, and small-to-medium financial institutions. All of those industries saw a huge increase in digitally-driven experiences from 2020 onward. NCR customers found that they needed to provide personalized, accessible, and relevant experiences in order to compete within existing markets. NCR, as an organization in the middle of a massive shift from a legacy hardware company to a software agency, found value in bringing a UI theming product to the market and hired me as a contractor. I was tasked with initiating an API-driven theming and branding engine to provide NCR customers with the ability to theme their software experiences and immerse their consumers in their brand. In addition to providing this to customers, the engine would also be used to support white label products across NCR's digital business. As a complementary add-on product to other NCR products, the engine’s ultimate goal was to build trust, ensuring that NCR-driven solutions met the high expectations set by our customers' excellent experiences.


Upon joining the Experience Design team and conducting a thorough analysis, I identified a crucial gap in the company's infrastructure—a lack of necessary mechanisms and tools to support a company-wide theming engine. Due to the value I brought to the project, I was quickly hired as an employee to lead the development of the design system. The system serves first and foremost as a B2E product that facilitates consistent, accessible, and sustainable user experiences across all NCR React-based products, as this is required in order for the system to also be used as a B2B add-on product that supports customer UI theming needs.


During my 2 years at NCR, I addressed inconsistency in user interfaces and the costly and time-consuming nature of custom branding for 9 of NCR’s React and React Native SaaS products and supported 5 enterprise organizations in using this add-on to extend their business capabilities. I did this by:

  • Talking to NCR customers to understand their unique needs,
  • Building relationships with product managers, designers, engineers, and subject matter experts across the organization,
  • Creating KPIs, OKRs, and SMART goals for the system and the team,
  • Collaborating with the team to develop a vision and strategic roadmap for the system,
  • Establishing operational processes to improve design-to-dev handoff,
  • Expanding team responsibilities and roles,
  • Prioritizing accessibility and WCAG 2.2 Level AA compliance,
  • Streamlining development processes to reduce redundant tasks, and
  • Leading a cross-functional team to design, implement, and test over 90 responsive web and native mobile components and patterns.

Covid changed user experiences. Now, people of all ages, abilities, and capacities use digital solutions for almost every conceivable productive or emotive need. Organizations that value inclusivity and efficiency will thrive. My work at NCR is an example of this. By spending the time to evaluate the basic components of a web page or native mobile app to ensure that they are accessible in any themed experience, NCR delighted customers, reduced cost overhead and legal risk, and accelerated time to-market. Our efforts saw an 80% increase in NPS scores, a reduction of $240,000 per product in project kickoff costs, and an acceleration of the time-to-market for new features by three months. Additionally, our work substantially reduced client legal risks by $500k and mitigated government contract risks by $500 million. My time at NCR was not just a job transition; it was a transformative experience that allowed me to lead, innovate, and significantly contribute to the company's digital product success.