This case study documents a multi-year effort to reconcile three independently evolving appointment-scheduling systems at USCIS. The work is presented using a slide-based synthesis paired with written commentary.
At the outset, this was not framed as a “design system project” in the abstract. It was a practical attempt to reconcile three appointment-scheduling products that had evolved independently, organizationally, technically, and politically.
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Each system had its own contract, stakeholders, and operating assumptions. None had benefited from sustained design involvement, and over time each accumulated UI and workflow decisions that were locally rational responses to immediate needs.
The result was not just surface-level inconsistency for users, but a deeper fragmentation in how teams understood the scope and structure of their products. Decisions made sense within individual contexts, yet there was no shared framework for reasoning across them.
This context mattered because consolidation could not be approached as a single unifying act. Progress depended on methods that allowed alignment to emerge incrementally, respected existing responsibilities, and created neutral ground for shared understanding. The solution space was therefore as much organizational as it was visual.
These outcomes reflected the cumulative effect of many small, deliberate decisions rather than a single moment of redesign. Reductions in page count, improvements in task completion time, and increased adoption emerged from sustained alignment across teams, particularly around shared abstractions, consistent patterns, and clearer decision-making processes. Equally important were qualitative shifts: faster onboarding, clearer communication, and a common framework for evaluating future change.
The issues outlined here, inconsistent UI, ad-hoc hierarchy, and competing stakeholder priorities, were tightly coupled.
The absence of a design strategy didn’t just produce messy interfaces, it created an environment where new functionality could only be expressed by adding pages, duplicating views, or creating bespoke exceptions. Over time, this led to deep navigation trees and redundant surfaces that obscured how the system actually worked.
Importantly, these problems were not caused by negligence or bad intent. They were an emergent result of product owners operating under pressure, without shared abstractions or a neutral framework for reasoning about change. Any durable solution had to address that root condition.
Fragmented styling and interactions confused users and slowed down development.
Redundant pages emerged from reactive, non-strategic feature expansion.
Competing visions made convergence difficult across teams and products.
Standardized components improved consistency, speed, and cross-team alignment.
Noun/verb mapping clarified features and enabled UI consolidation.
Design governance turned subjective debates into structured collaboration.
The most durable outcome of this work was not a cleaner interface, but a more resilient way of building software inside a complex institution.
By treating abstraction, iteration, and governance as design problems rather than administrative overhead, teams were able to coordinate without sacrificing autonomy. Alignment emerged gradually, disagreements became easier to resolve, and the system could evolve without repeatedly revisiting foundational decisions.
In that sense, the design system was not the product of the work, it was the condition that allowed the work to continue.
Rather than attempting a sweeping redesign across all products, I deliberately started small.
InfoPass was the least complex of the three systems and had a product owner who was open to experimentation. This made it an ideal environment to test an approach that emphasized research, abstraction, and incremental convergence, without placing other teams at risk.
