Client / Program
Merrill Lynch / Bank of America
Merrill Lynch / Bank of America
Enterprise Design System
An enterprise design system for internal financial advisor tools, created to reduce fragmented experiences, improve consistency, and support more scalable product delivery across advisor-facing platforms.
Role
Sr. UX/UI Consultant
Product
Internal Product Tools / Design System
Industry
Financial Services / Enterprise
Scale
6-person cross-functional team
Overview
Merrill Lynch faced a challenge with internal financial advisor tools that had been developed across different verticals and product teams. This created inconsistent design patterns, redundant components, fragmented experiences, and duplicated design and development effort.
As Sr. UX/UI Consultant, Jorge supported the development of an enterprise design system intended to create a more cohesive framework for advisor-facing tools.
Merrill Lynch, a division of Bank of America, needed to improve the consistency and scalability of internal enterprise tools used by financial advisors. The objective was to create a cohesive enterprise design system that could reduce fragmented user experiences, support reusable components, improve collaboration between design and engineering, and establish governance for future product work.
The real problem
Merrill Lynch, a division of Bank of America, had a set of internal enterprise financial advisor tools that had evolved in silos across different verticals.
The result was inconsistent design patterns, redundant components, fragmented user experiences, and duplicated effort across teams.
For financial advisors, the lack of a standardized framework created friction when moving across tools and workflows. For the organization, it created maintenance overhead and made it harder to scale product improvements consistently.
The core challenge was not simply visual consistency. It was creating a shared design and delivery foundation that could support advisor productivity, product scalability, and long-term governance.
Role and leadership
As Sr. UX/UI Consultant, Jorge helped shape the design system strategy and worked with cross-functional stakeholders across design, product, and engineering.
His responsibilities included contributing to design principles, component patterns, documentation standards, governance guidance, and alignment between design and development teams.
The role required translating fragmented advisor tool experiences into reusable patterns and helping establish a shared framework that could support future product delivery.
The work involved a 6-person cross-functional team. Collaboration was colocated, supporting close coordination between design, product, and engineering stakeholders throughout design, prototyping, testing, documentation, and implementation.
Methodology
The work followed a research-led, structure-first design process with continuous validation. The approach emphasized research over opinion, structure before surface, and continuous usability validation.
Frame - Align and define
Discover - Research and empathize
Structure - Information architecture
Ideate - Explore concepts
Interact - Optimize flows
Design - Visual and systems
Validate - Test and reduce risk
Launch - Build and QA
Improve - Measure and learn
Key deliverables
- Cross-platform enterprise design system
- Comprehensive pattern library
- Production-ready component codebase
- Design and development documentation
- FactSet data integration workflow considerations
- Governance standards and guidelines
Design process
Research and discovery
The research approach included user interviews, usability testing with financial advisors, and a detailed audit of existing tools.
The team cataloged design inconsistencies, redundant components, and workflow fragmentation across internal advisor platforms.
Key insights showed that advisors had to navigate disparate systems and inconsistent interaction patterns, creating unnecessary friction in their daily work.
Information architecture
The information architecture strategy focused on creating a clear organizational structure for the design system.
The team established taxonomy for components, patterns, and documentation so that designers and developers could find, understand, and reuse assets more easily.
A centralized pattern library served as a shared source of truth, helping reduce confusion across teams and improve consistency across product verticals.
Prototyping and testing
The team used iterative prototyping methods to explore key components and advisor workflows.
High-fidelity prototypes were created for critical patterns and reviewed with stakeholders and users.
Testing helped validate design assumptions, identify usability issues, and refine components before broader implementation.
Iterations and refinements
The project went through multiple iterations based on user feedback and stakeholder review.
Initial patterns and workflow designs were refined to improve clarity, usability, and guidance.
Feedback from advisors highlighted areas where contextual help, clearer interaction states, and better pattern documentation could improve the overall experience.
Technologies and methods
Outcomes
The design system work supported Merrill Lynch's goals around reducing design and development duplication, improving operational consistency, and creating a more scalable foundation for advisor-facing tools.
By establishing shared patterns, documentation, and governance, the initiative helped reduce fragmentation across tools and supported more consistent product delivery across verticals.
- Reduced design and development duplication through shared patterns
- Increased consistency across advisor-facing tools
- Supported lower long-term maintenance overhead through reusable components
- Improved financial advisor workflow consistency
- Supported faster delivery of new features through shared design and development foundations
- Enhanced scalability for future internal products
Reflection
What worked well
- Establishing a comprehensive pattern library created a stronger foundation for consistency.
- Collaboration between design and development helped translate design patterns into reusable product foundations.
- A shared design system improved alignment across teams working on advisor-facing tools.
Areas for improvement
- Faster feedback loops during testing would have helped refine components more efficiently.
- Greater upfront stakeholder buy-in could have accelerated adoption of the design system.
Key takeaways
- User feedback is essential when shaping design systems for complex enterprise tools.
- Design systems need governance, not just components.
- Cross-disciplinary collaboration is critical when turning design standards into usable product infrastructure.
Why this matters
Enterprise design systems are not only about visual consistency. They create shared foundations for governance, reuse, collaboration, and scalable delivery across complex product organizations.