  Enterprise Tools
  Design System
  UI / UX

From Fragmented Tools to a Cohesive System

Sales Overview evolved from a collection of ad-hoc reports into a unified platform. By leading the development of a scalable design system, I helped standardize UI patterns, streamline workflows, and establish a foundation for consistent, future-ready internal tools.

Role

Senior Product Designer

Company

First Trust Portfolios

Timeframe

2023 — 2025

The Challenge

Inconsistent Layouts

Multiple dev teams worked independently, creating mismatched layouts and UI styles across pages.

Adoption Barriers

Users struggled to navigate dense, inconsistent tools despite their reporting value.

No Shared System

First Trust lacked a design system, forcing one-off fixes instead of scalable solutions.

Sales Overview needed more than visual polish — it needed a system to unify how tools were designed, built, and maintained.

My Approach

Early Refinements

Assisted developers with incremental UI fixes, laying groundwork for broader changes.

System Thinking

Shifted from page-by-page design to component creation, growing elements from buttons to layouts.

Collaboration

Partnered with over 10 developers and product owners, ensuring adoption across the team.

A Working Concept

The effort to refactor Sales Overview is still in process today. The images below are a sampling of concepts that we’ve explored to-date. Even though the UI is still evolving, we’ve rooted our components in the css frameworks of Tailwind UI and Preline Pro. This way, we maintain a single voice for our UI elements, and the end goal solves our initial challenge of unifying the ui of all pages within the web application itself

The Sales Overview platform provided stakeholders with streamlined access to key client insights, enabling more informed decisions and measurable business growth.

The Impact

Driving Consistency and Adoption Firm-Wide

Clarity

Improved data tables and charts for easier decision-making.

Efficiency

Streamlined workflows reduced redundancy and user confusion.

Consistency

Unified design system provided a single source of truth for devs and stakeholders.

Sales Overview is no longer just a collection of reports — it’s a cohesive system trusted across the firm.

Looking Ahead

Expansion

Apply design system to connected internal tools (expense system, event management, fulfillment, HR, and beyond).

Consistency

Champion adoption of shared UI patterns across departments.

Future Vision

Continue refining tokens, components, and system documentation into a fully established design library.

The design system piloted in Sales Overview is setting the standard for First Trust’s future internal tools — scalable, adaptable, and ready to extend across departments.

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