2024 – Present

AFT Common Experience

A cross-org initiative establishing shared experience foundations through common requirements, design systems, and agent-enabled tooling—so teams can move faster with greater consistency and confidence.

Beyond defining standards, this work focused on creating the mechanisms, tools, and systems required to operationalize Common Experience across a decentralized organization.

Scope
Associate + Operator experiences across AFT products
Focus
Common requirements, design systems, agent-enabled tooling

Context

Common Experience (CE) is an AFT-XD program aimed at simplifying Associate and Operator workflows across the fulfillment network by defining and scaling common primitives—standard patterns, terminology, and interaction behaviors—across the tools used to run operations.

The program’s target impact includes $250MM+ in annualized cost savings, a 3.75% improvement in Veteran Curve efficiency, and a 25–35% reduction in UI development effort through reuse and clearer, shared standards.

I was one of the lead UX Designers supporting the CE program, focused on cross-product requirements and practical mechanisms that help teams adopt them.

Problem

AFT owns 500+ products used globally, many built independently over time without consistent experience standards. That fragmentation led to:

  • Duplicated effort across teams building similar UI and workflows
  • Inconsistent UIs that extend onboarding (often 4–8 weeks per process path)
  • High cognitive load for Operators navigating ~40+ tools and surfaces
  • Accessibility inconsistencies that reduce staffing flexibility and raise delivery risk

So what

Teams couldn’t reliably reuse patterns, Operators and Associates carried the burden of inconsistency, and improvement efforts scaled too slowly to match the size of the ecosystem.

Approach

Common Experience wasn’t delivered as a single artifact — it required a set of mechanisms that made standards understandable, enforceable, and scalable without central enforcement.

Common Experience Requirements (CER)

I authored the Common Experience Requirements (CER) to define a shared baseline of primitives and interaction expectations that every AFT product can implement—regardless of the front-end framework or local design system.

Using Alchemy (AFT-XD’s design system) as a benchmark, the CERs were organized into two groups:

  • Style and presentation — baseline rules for how UI elements are presented (visual and non-visual), aligning with what’s already built into Alchemy components.
  • Interaction and usage — guidance for interaction behaviors, with a strong accessibility lens, aligned through bar-raiser discussions and working sessions.
Read more about Common Experience Requirements

Scaling Adoption Through Strategic Rollout

In 2024, the team completed foundational planning to support scaled delivery: selecting target products, auditing current experiences, identifying cross-product patterns, creating a research plan, and securing implementation commitments from partner teams.

In 2025, the plan focused on designing and testing patterns across products/tools, synthesizing findings, and implementing the validated patterns in roadmap delivery—with a goal of reducing time-to-proficiency for Operations Associates by 10%.

Read more about the program rollout

CER Checker (Figma plugin)

With limited program capacity, I designed and developed a Figma plugin to validate designs against the CERs directly within Designers’ existing workflows.

The checker automatically flags common compliance issues (e.g., contrast, typography, detached system components), reducing meeting-driven bottlenecks and repeated rework.

Read more about the CER Checker plugin

AFT Design Knowledge Hub

After CE capacity was reduced, I created the AFT Design Knowledge Hub—a central repository of AFT design resources (tenets/traps framework, Alchemy documentation, research findings, and operational context), paired with specialized chat agents to help teams self-serve guidance and make consistent decisions faster.

Read more about the Design Knowledge Hub

Outcomes

  • Defined Common Experience Requirements documentation (~140 CERs) that teams can use to align experiences across products
  • Established CE rollout mechanisms (wiki, intake, office hours)
  • Produced 10+ pattern proposals spanning Operator and Associate experiences
  • Delivered 10+ research artifacts (audits, JTBD discovery, pattern synthesis, testing plans)
  • Shipped the CER Checker Figma plugin to scale compliance and reduce rework
  • Launched an agent-enabled Design Knowledge Hub to force-multiply design support

What’s next

  • CE team disbanded in Q4 2025; remaining work redistributed across AFT initiatives
  • Alchemy ownership moved; design support is currently limited
  • I continue to actively maintain the CER Checker Figma plugin
  • I continue to maintain and evolve the AFT Design Knowledge Hub, with planned improvements focused on stronger internal search coverage and richer signal inputs (e.g., usage and behavior data where available)