State Street · IBM iX
A shared language
for 166 products
How do you unify an enterprise with no shared design foundation? Start with the people.
How do you unify an enterprise with no shared design foundation? Start with the people.
Product teams were operating in silos. Every product looked and behaved differently. There was no shared foundation, no design principles, no common components. And nobody had really felt the full weight of that problem — until we mapped it.
The State Street Corporation is one of the largest and oldest financial institutions in the United States. The objective was twofold: create a cohesive experience across existing digital tools and establish guidelines for future experiences. I led the design team at IBM iX through every phase of that work.
166 products. Five universal experiences. One design system.
The design system wasn't just documentation — it powered a complete ecosystem. Here's what it looked like in practice: design principles that unified the team, a flagship experience rebuilt from the ground up, and a suite of products transformed by the new system.
My State Street was the north star product — the flagship experience that proved the design system worked at scale. We rebuilt it end-to-end, from the launch page to the data views, as a unified and cohesive experience.
The true measure of a design system is how well it scales. Here's the system in action across two very different products — a legacy client portal rebuilt with the new language, and an Apple Watch integration extending the experience beyond the desktop.
IBM iX developed a governance program that would help State Street evolve its design system. Product teams began practicing design thinking — focusing on user flows and use cases rather than requirements lists. Design shifted from being requirements-centered to user-centered.