The challenge
When I joined Oracle Developer Relations, there was no UX process, no usable design system, and no research on the people we were designing for. My job was to build all three and lead a team doing it. Oracle Developer Relations was undergoing a complete overhaul of how it communicated with its users across web, social, events, education, and community. Leadership was committed to building something world-class, and they needed someone to create the UX foundation from the ground up.
1. Evaluate the existing structures & process
What I found when I arrived made the challenge clearer: there was no design process in place. Stakeholders reached out directly to designers and told them what to build. The existing design system had been cobbled together over 15 years without maintenance. Page components were built on different grids, using different CSS classes, with baked-in legacy branding. Figma files were a mix of broken components, screenshots, and mismatched grids. There was no documentation, and the team that owned the system couldn’t support new additions or changes. Publishing a single page in the existing environment could take weeks and required build capacity from external teams. The existing process was unsuitable for our need to publish more frequently and at a greater speed.
2. Understanding our audience
Before touching a single wireframe, I needed to know who we were designing for. Oracle’s developer audience is not monolithic; it spans roles, experience levels, and use cases that have very different needs from a web experience.
To build a shared, evidence-based understanding of the audience, I ran a multi-stage research effort:
Conducted stakeholder interviews with subject matter experts, the analytics team, the events team, and leadership to map existing assumptions about the audience.
Surveyed 48 internal audience representatives to identify key segments and surface gaps in our understanding.
Interviewed 32 users twice, once before persona creation and once after, to validate and refine our models.
Synthesized findings into 8 developer personas that would anchor all downstream design and content decisions.
3. Auditing the existing design systems
In parallel with the research, I conducted a thorough audit of the existing component library to understand what we were working with and build a clear case for what needed to change.
Documented all existing components and mapped their technical incompatibilities.
Demonstrated the inability to assemble even a basic page using the existing system. This was a critical moment that shifted stakeholder perspective.
Ran a competitive audit to show how far Oracle’s developer experience lagged behind peers.
Identified best practices from industry leaders to set a benchmark for what “world class” looked like.
The audit findings gave me the evidence I needed to make the case for a new design system to stakeholders, VPs, and the CMO. The pitch worked.
4. Defining a phased approach
Rather than attempting a complete redesign all at once, I proposed a phased approach that balanced speed with quality. This phasing let us show progress early while preserving space for more ambitious work later. It also meant we weren’t asking stakeholders to wait a year to see results.
Phase 1: Build the minimum system needed to support a 1:1 CMS migration to get the site off the legacy platform with a clean, working foundation, maintaining existing site content & structure.
Phase 2: Information architecture overhaul — optimized user journeys, navigation, additional components, asset libraries, and documentation.
Phase 3: Surprise and delight — premium assets, depth system, world-class experience.
5. Building a design system
The design system was built from atomic principles up:
A new grid system modern, responsive, bootstrap-style 12-column grid, designed to look great from 320px to 1920px+.
A component color palette system built for one-click palette swaps.
A type ramp built around XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL sizing to take the guess work out of when to use which size.
Standardized buttons, inputs, labels, icons, action triggers, and links.
94 distinct page components across 4 responsive breakpoints, supporting light and dark page themes.
Component categories included: heroes, features, cards, columns, headers, lists, tabs, banners, testimonials, mosaics, logo carousels, accordions, paragraph blocks, galleries, video, code, modals, navigation, alerts, backgrounds, and social components.
6. Building a team
The scale of this project required more than two designers. We hired three designers to support the CMS migration and redesign effort, and built a design process that set them up to do their best work. The process I built wasn’t just about this project; it was designed to scale beyond it. By the time the migration was complete, the team had internalized a way of working that could carry forward into Phase 2 and 3.
My leadership responsibilities included:
Leading standups and assigning weekly tasks aligned to migration milestones.
Reviewing all design work and providing structured feedback tied to system standards and user research.
Mentoring junior designers, teaching web design process, component-based page design, and how to design for CMS constraints.
Building a page design workflow that made the quality bar explicit and repeatable.
7. The site migration
With the design system in place, I led the design team through a complete redesign of the Oracle Developer site. 175 pages migrated to the new system and CMS. Key areas of focus included:
Homepage: A complete reimagining of the entry point for the developer audience, designed around the persona needs identified in research.
Category pages: I specifically fought to add these to the existing site structure for cleaner navigation pathways for different developer audiences and topic areas.
Basic page templates: A system of flexible, on-brand templates that content authors could use without breaking the design.
8. Outcomes
We moved Oracle’s developer experience from one that was stakeholder-driven and inconsistent to one that was user-informed, system-governed, and built to scale. Over two years, we built something Oracle Developer Relations had never had before:
A research foundation: 8 developer personas grounded in interviews with 32 real users across two research rounds.
A working design system: 94 components built from scratch, documented, and delivered across 4 breakpoints and 2 themes.
A new quick-to-publish CMS system: taking page build time from weeks to hours.
A redesigned site: 175 pages migrated and redesigned on a new CMS, built with the system we created.
A knowledgeable team with a process: a small team of designers hired, onboarded, and working to a consistent, documented standard.