Reach Out

© Andy Miller 2025

Cox

Cox Design System

My Role

As a core contributor and UX lead to the Cox Design System (CDS), I helped drive its evolution from a collection of loosely connected assets into a streamlined, scalable system. My work focused on reorganizing the system’s structure, introducing new components, improving documentation, and supporting day-to-day design operations across teams.

Challenges

The Cox Design System was expanding rapidly during its development, but its underlying structure lacked clarity and consistency. A dozen components had already been built before I joined the team, with organization driven by speed rather than long-term scalability. Documentation and usage guidelines varied in depth, and the system lacked a cohesive strategy for extensibility and reuse.

Key issues included:

  • Ambiguous or technology-driven component naming conventions

  • Fragmented documentation across design and code

  • Single-page component library with poor navigability and discoverability

  • Lack of a feedback loop between designers and engineers

Key Contributions

1. System Reorganization

Led a major reorganization of the Cox Design System component library while maintaining daily system usage.

  • Separated components per page, enhancing navigation, wayfinding and collaboration
  • Collaborated with teams to ensure the new structure aligned with how designers and developers use the system day to day.
  • Introduced component taxonomy by platform, informing designers of a component’s availability per technology stack.
2. New Components & Enhancements

  • Built a wide range of tokenized components using Tokens Studio and Figma Variables, structured across atomic, molecular, and organism levels for use in the design system.

  • Upgraded components to better reflect live product behavior, increasing alignment between design and development and reducing the gap from concept to implementation.

  • Simplified the Design System using Figma Variables, enabling advanced theming and integrating translation into foundational components to create a more efficient and performant system.

3. Documentation & Support Strategy

  • Re-housed detailed global component information to Storybook, and reshaped usage guidelines within Figma to be designer specific.

  • Created “Getting Started” and “Table of Contents” pages to aid discoverability, onboarding and support.

  • Advocated for inclusive language and consistent tone throughout the organization with a shared glossary for design system terms.

  • Introduced a dedicated Cox Design System channel to centralize system updates, changelogs, feedback, and Q&A.

4. Cross-functional Partnership

  • Established regular syncs with engineering and design teams to share feedback, QA components, and triage system bugs.

  • Led dedicated channels and workspaces to support long-term collaboration between accessibility and design teams.

  • Maintained close collaboration with product stakeholders to ensure system evolution aligned with business goals.

Impact

  • Reduced component ambiguity and redundancy, improving adoption and streamlining productivity across teams

  • Accelerated onboarding by delivering a clearer, better-structured documentation experience

  • Enabled the design system to scale efficiently across products without bloating the component set

  • Fostered stronger collaboration between design and engineering through shared understanding and processes

Reflections

Design system work is equal parts strategy, communication, and craft. At Cox, I had the opportunity to shape not just components, but how teams think about consistency, flexibility, and collaboration. The process taught me the importance of balance: between specificity and reuse, between structure and evolution, and between design excellence and team enablement.

View the release presentation here

Let’s Connect: contact@designbyamiller.com

Here goes your text … Select any part of your text to access the formatting toolbar.