Centralizing Design at GE to Move Faster and Smarter

GE Renewable Energy had multiple teams designing and building across different platforms — Digital Wind Farm, MTM Mobile, and more — but no unified design language connecting any of it. Designers duplicated work constantly. Developers recreated the same components with slight variations across codebases. Even basic decisions like button styles, font weights, and icon usage differed wildly depending on which team you talked to.

The result was accumulating design debt, slower build times, and a product ecosystem that felt inconsistent to the people using it. My goal as a UX Design Intern was to research, scope, and build a centralized design system — the GE REDS Design System — that could serve as a single source of truth for design and engineering teams across the organization.

Annotated UI components from existing GE products, surfacing questions about purpose, behavior, and visual logic that had never been formally documented. These became the foundation for cross-team alignment conversations.

Choosing the right platform was a real decision with real stakes — the wrong tool would create adoption friction, slow down engineering handoff, or get blocked by GE's approval process entirely. I evaluated four candidates: InVision DSM, Knapsack, Zeroheight, and Storybook, across criteria that mattered to our actual situation: Sketch integration with live sync, the ability to document both design and code in one place, approval-free collaboration for a cross-functional team, and GE corporate approval status.

InVision DSM was the only platform that checked all four. It offered real-time Sketch sync, combined design and code documentation, easy collaboration without gated approval flows, and was already cleared by GE's internal security and procurement process. I presented this analysis directly to stakeholders before a single component was built, which meant the platform decision had full buy-in before we committed to it.

The competitive analysis matrix used to evaluate and select InVision DSM. InVision was the only platform to satisfy all four criteria — Sketch sync, design + code documentation, collaboration, and GE approval.

The full information architecture for the GE REDS Design System, covering Desktop and Mobile platforms across Style Guide, Iconography, Templates, Navigation, and Components.

If I could go back, I'd push harder to establish a formal contribution model earlier. Teams eventually wanted to add their own components to the system, but there was no defined process for submitting, reviewing, or approving community contributions. That gap created some ambiguity around system ownership that I'd want to close from day one with a clear governance framework.

I'd also instrument the system earlier. We had anecdotal evidence of adoption — fewer tickets, positive feedback in reviews — but I didn't have usage analytics tracking which components were being pulled most, or which were being skipped in favor of one-offs. That data would have made the case for ongoing investment much stronger and shaped where I spent time in the later weeks.