Building the Walmart Partner Experiences Pattern Library

2024 - 2025

CHALLENGE

To support its growing network of business partners, Walmart is in constant need to provide high-quality enterprise tools. However, the existing core design system (Living Design) was not robust enough for these complex applications. This led to about 20 teams independently building their own subsystems, resulting in a fragmented user experience, duplicated effort, and inefficient designer workflows.

GOALS

Our primary goal was to solve these issues by creating a unified, scalable Partner Experiences Pattern Library that would:

• Enhance design quality and deliver consumer-grade experiences at scale.
• Ensure user consistency across all partner-facing applications.
• Increase the speed of design and development

MY ROLE

As a Senior Product Designer on the team, I was a key individual contributor responsible for designing and shaping the library. I worked within a highly collaborative team that included other senior designers, an embedded designer from the core Living Design team, and an accessibility expert. My role was to take ownership of key areas of the library, from foundational components to user research and designer adoption.

MY CONTRIBUTIONS

Designed Foundational Components and Templates

I championed several key initiatives to ensure the library was not only well-designed but also intuitive and successfully adopted. I designed and documented foundational components, from simple overlays and form elements, to complex data table patterns. I built each component to be flexible and easy to customize, with the goal of minimizing the need for designers to detach instances and maintain system consistency.

For more complex components like the data table, we intentionally kept the main properties panel simple. To offer powerful customization without overwhelming the user, designers can dive into the component's layers to configure its deeply nested instances.

Led the Library's Information Architecture

To streamline our team's time-consuming process for defining the library's information architecture, I led an initiative using Figjam to quickly visualize and test different organizational structures with other designers, leading to faster feedback and alignment on the final IA.

Co-Led User Research for Key Patterns

For our most complex component, the data table, I proactively partnered with a researcher to co-lead a usability study with Marketplace sellers. The test was focused on exploring full, "spreadsheet-like" editing capabilities to enhance our existing table. The insights we gathered were instrumental; we learned that while sellers loved the speed of editing directly in-line, they also needed robust safeguards and control. This ensured the final component met their real-world needs.

Championed Adoption and Support

Lastly, I was a key advocate for the library, running onboarding demos, providing daily support to our community of ~180 designers, and creating video tutorials and usage guidelines to empower our users.

THE PX PATTERN LIBRARY

The resulting PX Pattern Library is a conveniently organized design system that provides a "Squarespace-like" experience in Figma. It's designed to empower designers to drag-and-drop page templates and pre-built patterns, allowing them to focus on user flows instead of production work. 

IMPACT & RESULTS

Metrics at a Glance

• Widespread Adoption: Actively used by 73 teams across Walmart.
• Massive Engagement: Over 150,000 component insertions in a single week at its peak.
• Critical Component Success: The Data Table system I led accounted for over 826,000 insertions in the last year, making it the library's most used component.
• Feedback from an early beta test showed most designers estimated saving 30-50% of their time on design work

Voices from the Team

"PX is crucial to build consistency and help design teams work faster. There are so many contradicting patterns across products. Countless hours are wasted trying to track down components from the various subsystems. Investing (and growing) the PX library is key to providing a streamlined, best-in-class experience across all of our partner products.” — Caroline, Supplier One Team

"Having a robust library geared towards the partner ecosystem has been really insightful and such a boost to cross-team collaboration... As I’ve stepped into a brand new product, I am finding PX useful for page layouts and templates - I’m spending less time on production details and more time on the IA and general value of the product.” — Alyx, Data Experiences Team

PERSONAL LEARNINGS & REFLECTIONS

This project was a tremendous growth opportunity for me, as it was my first time working directly on a large-scale design system. It gave me a profound appreciation for the crucial role that robust design systems play in enabling quality and efficiency across a large organization.

On a technical level, I significantly enhanced my Figma skills, delving into the intricacies of building complex, scalable components. I learned firsthand how to ensure every pattern was not only compliant with brand tokens and variables but also met WCAG accessibility standards. This experience has been invaluable and has fundamentally strengthened my approach to systematic and inclusive design.