Design System - Digital Library

Digital Library serves as a centralized repository of reusable UI components—built to ensure consistency, efficiency, and scalability across digital products. By leveraging structured documentation, standardized interaction patterns, and flexible variants, the library enables designers and developers to build cohesive experiences with speed and clarity.

Integrated directly into our design system, the Digital Library promotes cross-functional alignment, reduces redundancy, and accelerates the product development cycle. It has become a foundational tool for maintaining brand integrity and streamlining collaboration across teams.

Project Overview

Built to support scalable design, the Digital Library empowers teams to easily find and apply reusable UI components, ensuring a consistent user experience across products while minimizing design debt.

My Role

Visual Design, UI Development Support

Teammate(s)

Lead Visual Designer: Lauren Leonard

Duration

4 years, on going

Deliverables

UI Pattern Documentation

Setting the Stage

As Florida Blue’s digital products continued to scale across brands, devices, and teams, inconsistencies in interface design and development began to surface. Designers recreated similar components across projects, developers rebuilt patterns from scratch, and small visual discrepancies accumulated into a fragmented user experience. The absence of a centralized UI library created inefficiencies, slowed down delivery, and made it difficult to enforce accessibility and brand standards at scale.

To solve this, we set out to build the Digital Library—a unified, reusable UI component system designed to promote consistency, speed, and collaboration across design and engineering teams. This initiative laid the foundation for a scalable design system that would streamline workflows, reduce rework, and ensure every user-facing product reflected the same level of quality, clarity, and cohesion.

Understanding the Problem

Without a centralized UI component library, design and development teams faced repeated inefficiencies and growing inconsistencies across digital products. Components were recreated from scratch for each project, leading to visual and functional discrepancies, increased design debt, and slower delivery timelines.

The lack of standardized, reusable components made it difficult to enforce accessibility (WCAG/ADA), maintain brand alignment, and support cross-functional collaboration. As a result, teams spent valuable time rebuilding solutions instead of focusing on innovation—ultimately impacting the scalability, cohesion, and quality of the overall user experience.

Documenting UI Pattern

We conduct a UI audit across current products (e.g., buttons, inputs, modals), identified duplicate patterns, style inconsistencies, and accessibility issues, and mapped components to usage contexts (e.g., platform, device type, viewport). Then, I used Variants and Auto Layout for flexibility and responsiveness, applied properties like size, states (hover, active, disabled), and included usage examples and do/don’t guidelines for clarity.

Final Takeaway

  • Consistency: Ensures a unified user experience by standardizing design and interaction patterns.

  • Efficiency: Speeds up design and development by reusing pre-built components instead of recreating from scratch.

  • Scalability: Supports growth by making it easy to maintain, update, and extend the UI system.

  • Collaboration: Bridges designers and developers with shared language, documentation, and tools.

  • Quality: Promotes better usability and accessibility by embedding best practices into components.

  • Governance: Requires ongoing maintenance, clear versioning, and governance to keep it relevant and aligned with product needs.