Transforming Instacart's ecosystem
Injecting life, longevity, and scale into the world's most popular grocery app.
Brand: Instacart
Date: 2019
Platforms: iOS/Android/Web
Role: Design Systems Lead (Founding)
Status: Live - Phased LaunchInstacart is one of the world’s largest online grocers. Over time, its buyer, shopper, and retailer experiences were optimized by many teams, leaving the ecosystem dated, bloated, and inconsistent. I led the creation of a modern, scalable design system that enabled faster product development while grounding the company in a refreshed, durable brand language.
Instacart had grown fast, and the UI grew in pieces: different patterns, different component libraries, and different definitions of “done.” That fragmentation eroded trust at high-stakes moments and created an expensive workflow where teams rebuilt the same solutions. I recruited a dedicated design + engineering team to unify the ecosystem, reduce duplicated work, and create a system that could evolve over the next 5–10 years. We paired vision prototypes with incremental roadmaps and targeted experiments to validate the system in real product surfaces, with alignment from leadership (c-suite) through rollout.
DESIGN FRAMEWORK
The framework is organized and scales consistently across iOS, Android, and web.
Buyers can quickly find what they need for a recipe, shoppers can complete picks with confidence in motion, and retailers can review performance without wading through clutter. The system standardized sizing, spacing, type, form, and color into a set of durable rules—so screens feel coherent, brand-forward, and easy to extend as new needs emerge.
RECIPES
Design choices turn grocery shopping into culinary inspiration
Instacart had proven it could handle grocery delivery, but the design system was in need of soul. Every border radius, color palette, and illustration aimed at making groceries personal, social, and aspirational. We made recipes the heart of a refreshed buyer experience - with new components featuring large, engaging photography and editorial layouts that made Instacart a destination.
SHOPPING LIST
The new in-store experience helps shoppers move like a pro
Large tap targets, clear content, dynamic context, and hands-free UX patterns made the in-store shopper experience more efficient, while substantially reducing Instacart’s overhead. By stripping back the design language to its bare essentials, we created space for critical content to come to the surface - ensuring shoppers pick the right items, and buyers get the best groceries.
ONBOARDING
From piecemeal flows to holistic stories
Instacart’s onboarding had been pieced together over time, creating inconsistency at the exact moments we were asking people for high-trust actions like background checks or ID verification. We redesigned onboarding as a cohesive, scalable storyline so every step feels and behaves consistently, and new requirements can be added, reordered, or expanded without breaking the flow or the user’s confidence.
ACCESSIBILITY
The system flexes for the needs of many people.
The new system didn’t just meet WCAG standards—we introduced dynamic sizing so customers could choose a larger, easier-to-read UI or a denser layout that fits more content per screen, depending on their preference. We also built a scaling color system that can shift between WCAG AA/AAA, high-contrast, or monochrome modes, with numeric tokens that make accessible color choices the default—no manual contrast checks required.
Outcome:
The new system shortened shipping cycles by turning common UI into shared infrastructure—feature timelines moved from months to weeks, and engineers spent far less time reinventing the same patterns. The product felt more seamless and trustworthy across buyer, shopper, and retailer experiences, and the system created the foundation that made larger initiatives possible to ship with coherence and speed. Even without a single “design systems ROI” metric, the step-change was clear: better quality, established team structure, and durable design decisions that are still used today (6 years later).
Reflection:
Looking back, I can’t point to one number that captures the full value of a design system because its real impact shows up everywhere, quietly, across hundreds of decisions. Yes, we consolidated 4,800+ colors to 121, reduced 5+ fonts to one, and introduced a six-density accessibility model—but the deeper win was shifting Instacart from handcrafted screens to a scalable product language. Personally, I learned to volunteer my curiosity: to bring other teams into the work, share authorship, and build momentum through a coalition.
Open to the next build
If you’re working on physical/digital products where craft and constraints matter, I’d love to connect!