Grocery Outlet
Enterprise UX Transformation & Design System Governance
Role: Director of User Experience
As Director of User Experience, I was tasked with establishing Grocery Outlet’s first centralized UX practice. My work spanned design operations, accessibility governance, and experience analytics: connecting six internal systems into one cohesive ecosystem used daily by more than 1,000 store operators and employees.
At a Glance
- • Founded Grocery Outlet’s first enterprise-grade design system.
- • Introduced UX Acceptance Testing (UXAT) to embed usability and accessibility checks into Agile sprints.
- • Partnered with Legal & Security to formalize ADA and privacy compliance across all platforms.
- • Defined the experience analytics roadmap.
- • Unified design across 6+ internal portals supporting operations, marketing, logistics, and analytics.
Overview
Grocery Outlet operates a national network of independently owned stores powered by multiple internal systems. When I joined, these digital tools were inconsistent, disconnected, and lacked a shared UX foundation. My charter was to modernize the end-to-end experience, create scalable design standards, and embed UX into the organization’s operating model.
Challenge
Years of team-specific development had resulted in fragmented experiences, competing design patterns, and accessibility gaps. Beyond aligning the visuals, we needed to create a repeatable UX framework – one that could scale across both internal and consumer platforms while remaining compliant and measurable.
Approach
I led the UX modernization initiative from the ground up, redefining how internal tools were designed, documented, and maintained. Working closely with product and engineering leadership, I introduced a standardized UX process and clear design principles that unified how teams approached interface design.
A central focus of this effort was the creation of Grocery Outlet’s first design system- a scalable, modular framework built to ensure visual consistency, accessibility compliance, and efficiency across all internal platforms. I also implemented UX Acceptance Testing (UXAT) as part of the release cycle, ensuring that every update met defined usability and accessibility standards before deployment.
Throughout the initiative, I partnered across departments to align priorities, establish governance, and embed UX into the organization’s broader digital strategy.
Principles and Focus
The transformation was guided by a clear set of principles that shaped both strategy and execution. Consistency and clarity were essential for unifying fragmented patterns and creating a shared design language. Compliance and accessibility ensured every product adhered to ADA, WCAG, and privacy standards. Efficiency and governance centered on developing reusable systems, reducing redundancy, and establishing a culture of accountability through defined UX processes. Finally, insight-driven design connected analytics and usability testing directly to decision-making, allowing each release to be informed by data rather than intuition.
Outcome
The modernization effort delivered the first cohesive UX strategy in the company’s history, creating alignment between design, engineering, and business teams. Internal tools now share a unified design direction supported by a documented system and repeatable process. Accessibility standards were formalized, and development efficiency improved through reusable patterns and component libraries.
This work laid the foundation for Grocery Outlet’s long-term UX maturity, establishing the processes, systems, and culture necessary to sustain consistent, scalable, and user-focused design across its internal digital ecosystem.
Metrics
• 25 % faster design-to-development turnaround through component reuse.
• 40 % reduction in post-release accessibility issues.
• 90 % of new internal tools launched using the unified design system.
• Defined analytics roadmap now used to measure UX health across platforms.
Internal Systems Refresh
Design System Creation/Deployment for Internal Staff and Store Facing Workers.
