While the Carbon Design System served as the “core” library, dozens of local systems emerged over the years to meet specific product needs. These libraries were valuable but introduced style inconsistencies, asset duplication, and siloed workflows. Designers and developers often had to dig through multiple systems to find usable components, and there was no unified way to discover or contribute assets. Our team set out to solve this: create a platform where IBM makers could find, use, and contribute standardized design assets and code libraries—all in one place.

I worked across disciplines to bring the Carbon Platform to life. I led user research, contributed both low and high-fidelity designs, wrote front-end code for the platform itself, and helped create a schema to index assets. This work was highly cross-functional, requiring deep collaboration with designers, developers, and library maintainers across the company.

I started with foundational research. I led interviews and usability studies with internal IBM teams to understand how they searched for assets, what barriers they encountered, and what a “source of truth” would mean to them. These insights revealed a strong need for standardization, clearer taxonomy, and better tooling to support discovery and governance. The research directly informed our core platform structure and the asset schema we later developed.

From there, I moved into prototyping and interface design. Early explorations focused on how to surface the right information at the right time—balancing depth of content with discoverability. I designed filtering patterns, content layouts, and taxonomy labels that made it easier for users to browse and evaluate assets.

I tested design directions with users using varied methods. For example, how quickly and easily a user could find a specific asset that met all their requirements. I refined the experience based on what they needed to trust and implement the assets they found.

On the development side, I helped build core features of the platform, including the asset catalog interface and schema-driven rendering logic. I helped develop a tagging structure powered search and filtering, and contributed to our live indexing system that keeps platform content current and version-aware. I also helped migrate documentation from carbondesignsystem.com, enhancing it with richer metadata and clearer pathways between core and local systems.

A key outcome of this work I want to highlight was a shared schema for indexing assets. I collaborated with library maintainers to define asset metadata and governance standards. This schema now powers how assets are categorized, displayed, and versioned across the platform—and has enabled us to scale from a handful of libraries to over 250 assets from more than 10 teams.