EvoLite Design System

Business Context

Prudential’s digital ecosystem spanned multiple platforms, technologies, and product teams, resulting in noticeable inconsistencies between React-based applications and Salesforce experiences. These variations impacted customer confidence, increased implementation complexity, and introduced unnecessary design and technical debt.

Partnering closely with Salesforce engineering leadership, I identified the strategic opportunity to align Salesforce experiences with Prudential’s broader enterprise design standards. By creating a more cohesive visual language and interaction model, the initiative helped strengthen brand consistency, improve customer trust, and establish a foundation for future digital growth.

Leadership Scope

As Design Manager and Design System Lead, I was responsible for defining and driving adoption of the EvoLite design system across Salesforce experiences.

Key responsibilities included:

• Establishing design standards, governance models, and reusable component frameworks

• Developing scalable processes for reviewing and approving new custom components

• Partnering with Accessibility, UX Writing, Legal, Compliance, Product, and Engineering stakeholders to ensure enterprise-wide alignment

Beyond creating components, the initiative focused on building the operational structure necessary to scale design quality across multiple teams and business units.

Identifying the Opportunity

Shortly after joining Prudential, I was tasked with helping deliver a critical annuities transaction experience. During project onboarding, I asked a simple question:

“How does the customer get to this experience?”

The answer revealed a much larger organizational challenge.

Customers began their journey within a React-based dashboard that followed Prudential’s evolving enterprise design standards. Upon launching a Salesforce transaction, however, they were immediately transitioned into a significantly different experience powered primarily by out-of-the-box Salesforce components.

Although both experiences technically adhered to brand guidelines, they differed in visual language, interaction patterns, navigation structures, component styling, and overall user experience. Customers were unknowingly moving between two design systems within a single journey.

This inconsistency created friction, weakened trust, and highlighted the need for a more unified approach to experience design across Prudential’s digital ecosystem.

Planning the Transformation

Rather than treating the issue as a visual refresh, I positioned it as a strategic design systems initiative.

Working alongside Salesforce engineering leadership, we conducted an audit of existing Salesforce experiences, component usage, and implementation patterns. The assessment uncovered significant duplication, inconsistent customization practices, and limited governance around new component creation.

Together, we developed a roadmap to evolve Salesforce experiences toward a shared design language that aligned more closely with Prudential’s enterprise standards while respecting Salesforce platform constraints.

The strategy focused on three core objectives:

Improve customer trust through greater visual and interaction consistency.

Increase delivery efficiency through reusable patterns and shared components.

Establish governance processes that would enable long-term scalability across teams.

Building the System

Transforming the Salesforce experience required more than updating components. Success depended on creating a sustainable framework that design, product, and engineering teams could confidently adopt and scale.

To support the initiative, I partnered with a Senior Salesforce Designer and a Salesforce development specialist to establish the foundations of the EvoLite Design System. Together, we created a repeatable process for component design, review, implementation, and adoption.

Weekly working sessions enabled rapid decision-making, issue resolution, and prioritization, while ongoing collaboration with Accessibility, UX Writing, Legal, Compliance, Product, and Engineering teams ensured that every pattern met both customer and enterprise requirements.

Many of the decisions that appear simple on the surface required extensive cross-functional alignment. Topics such as color contrast ratios, component states, data formatting standards, spacing, typography, button treatments, and corner radii were evaluated through the lens of usability, accessibility, compliance, and technical feasibility.

The result was a system that balanced customer experience, enterprise standards, and Salesforce platform constraints.

Designed to function like a website, the documentation experience included:

This approach provided designers, product teams, and developers with a single source of truth while significantly reducing onboarding and implementation friction.

Enabling Engineering

Adoption required more than design documentation.

Working closely with Salesforce engineering leadership and our CSS development team, we established implementation guidance that connected design decisions directly to Salesforce development practices.

Using Omniscript-based references and implementation examples, engineering teams gained a clear understanding of component usage, customization constraints, and code injection requirements when necessary.

This partnership ensured that design standards could be consistently translated into production experiences while reducing ambiguity during implementation.

Impact and Outcomes