Xbox Gaming Design System
Xbox wasn't starting from zero — that was the problem. Patterns existed, they just existed differently on every team. I researched and built components for the Gaming Design System that consolidated what was already out there into one shared source of truth, so teams could stop rebuilding the same things slightly differently.
The problem
The hard part of a design system at this scale isn’t inventing components — it’s reconciling the ones already in the wild. Multiple teams had solved the same problems independently, each version defensible on its own, none of them consistent with each other. Consolidating meant deciding whose version won, and making the shared one good enough that adopting it felt like a gain rather than a loss.
The process
I audited and researched existing patterns across products, then built consolidated components in Sketch and added them into the shared system for developers to implement. The goal was a system that streamlined the design-to-development handoff — not just documenting what a component looks like, but making it easy enough to adopt that consistency became the path of least resistance.