DEX Design System
Building the foundation a new company would stand on.
GE Vernova | UX interaction designer | 2017-Present
The Problem
GE Vernova's platform grew out of Predix, GE's earlier industrial IoT platform, and it showed. UI patterns were fragmented across product teams, each with their own conventions. Some teams had modern, actively maintained frontends. Others were running legacy implementations that couldn't easily absorb updates in bulk — and any shared system had to work for both without leaving the legacy teams behind. On top of that, nothing in the organization had ever set an accessibility standard or a responsive design standard. Every team was solving those problems on their own, if they solved them at all.
A sample of bespoke GEDI icons with no Material Design equivalent, identified as gaps in the move to DEX. Icons are named where the source audit labeled them and numbered where names are still to be assigned.
Colors defined in the UX team's UI toolkit as well as its legacy documentation were not implemented correctly or consistently by adopting module teams. This made QA an impossible hurdle, but it also meant there was not a central hub that could provide widespread updates.
My Role
Staff UX Designer. I led the design of DEX from the ground up — setting the accessibility and responsive standards for a platform that needed to work across a genuinely mixed technology landscape, with teams on different frameworks and different levels of technical maturity. Design work ran about a year; engineering build has been underway for about two years since.
What I Did and Why
Made accessibility a baseline, not an add-on
DEX is the organization's first accessibility-first design system, built to WCAG 2.2 Level AA from the ground up rather than audited in after the fact. Every component has to meet that standard before it ships. The color token system's automated contrast grid — testing every foreground-background combination against AA and AAA thresholds — is one direct result of setting that bar at the start instead of checking for it later.
Audit artifact (Figma board, annotated grid, or spreadsheet) showing catalogued UI variation across the product
Set the first responsive standard the org had ever had
Before DEX, responsive behavior was up to each team, if anyone addressed it at all. I built responsive design into DEX as a baseline requirement, the same way I did accessibility — not a feature some components have, but a standard every component meets.
Sticker sheet excerpt or diagram distinguishing custom DEX components from styled third-party ones
Built DEX as one foundation, not a bundle of separate tools
The pieces of DEX aren't independent — they're designed to reinforce each other. The accessibility-first token system feeds every component's color and contrast. The icon library and the sticker sheet handoff protocol both build on that same foundation rather than solving color, spacing, or documentation on their own. A team adopting DEX doesn't adopt four separate systems; they adopt one system where the parts were built to fit together from the start. That's what makes it a foundation rather than a component library — the pieces compound instead of just coexisting.
The Scope
GE Vernova's first accessibility-first (WCAG 2.2 Level AA), responsive design system — the shared foundation the token architecture, icon library, and sticker sheet handoff protocol all build on. Built to work across a mix of modern and legacy team implementations.
Where It Stands
Design complete after about a year. Engineering build has been underway for about two years and is ongoing. Adoption is early but growing across product teams.
