Our team built together the foundational design system for Gap Inc.’s multi-branded e-commerce platform, enabling consistent experiences across four distinct brands — Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta.
Case
The Challenge
Managing multiple brand identities within a shared store platform created fragmented experiences and inefficient development workflows. Each brand had its own patterns and audience expectations, resulting in disjointed and inconsistent usability.
My Role
Design Audit
What the Audit Revealed
The audit uncovered widespread redundancy and inconsistency — 200+ overlapping components, uneven interactions, mismatched tokens, and variable accessibility. These gaps created friction, slowed teams, and made cross-brand scaling difficult, reinforcing the need for a unified, token-driven system.
How the Audit Provided Value
The audit created a clear blueprint for unifying the brands by identifying consolidation opportunities, aligning stakeholders, and establishing the foundation for a scalable system. By quantifying redundancies and gaps, it justified investment, sped up decisions, and enabled faster design-to-dev handoff and a reduction in duplicate components.
Research
Baymard Research
Using Baymard Institute’s research gave us evidence-based benchmarks to evaluate our designs. This ensured our design system improvements were not only consistent with industry standards but aligned with patterns proven to boost usability and conversion.
User Interviews
We also conducted user interviews to validate explorations with our unique audience and uncover nuances that Baymard benchmarks don’t capture. This combination allowed us to ground our decisions in proven best practices while still innovating beyond them to meet real user needs.
A/B Testing for Iterative Design
A/B testing provided real-world validation, showing which variations performed best with actual users. It backed our decisions with clear, data-driven evidence.
Learnings
Outcomes