Ingredients Design System

About ezCater

ezCater is a U.S.-based corporate catering platform that connects businesses with a nationwide network of restaurants and caterers. Companies use ezCater to order group meals for everything from significant events to everyday team lunches, while the platform manages restaurant discovery, ordering, logistics, and delivery coordination.

Ingredients is ezCater’s first company-wide design system, crafted to bring unity and clarity to product design and development across the marketplace, ezManage partner tools, and Relish meal programs. By offering a shared set of UI components, interaction patterns, accessibility standards, and brand guidelines—supported by Figma libraries and ready-to-use code—Ingredients empowers every team to deliver consistent, intuitive, and scalable experiences. The system streamlines collaboration, reduces redundant work, and accelerates product development for both web and mobile.

Challenge

Before Ingredients, ezCater’s rapidly expanding product ecosystem faced growing pains: UI inconsistency, duplicated design efforts, accessibility oversights, and tangled engineering workflows. Teams often reinvented the wheel, building similar components with subtle differences, which slowed delivery, caused more QA headaches, and made it harder to maintain consistency across platforms. Without a shared design language or governance, scaling product development and upholding quality became increasingly difficult as new teams and initiatives emerged.

Solution

We created Ingredients as a modular, cross-platform design system built on a token-based foundation, ensuring brand consistency and flexibility across all ezCater products. By establishing a unified visual language, a robust component library, and clear interaction patterns, we aligned design and engineering for the web. To drive lasting adoption, we introduced a governance model, contribution workflow, and versioning process that gave teams confidence and clarity as they used or expanded the system. Close collaboration with engineering led to a shared code component library, guaranteeing design and implementation matched seamlessly. We also launched comprehensive documentation, onboarding resources, workshops, and office hours to support teams across the organization. The result: a scalable, dependable, enterprise-grade system that sped up delivery, raised quality, and unified ezCater’s multi-product ecosystem.

Contribution

As Senior Design Manager, I set the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Ingredients and rallied cross-functional teams to bring it to life. I worked hand in hand with product and engineering leaders to pinpoint core challenges, build consensus on the system’s direction, and prioritize essential components for early wins. I led workshops to align teams on patterns, taxonomy, and accessibility, and drove research to uncover workflow pain points for designers and engineers. Overseeing UX and UI direction, I ensured every component met ezCater’s accessibility and cross-platform behavior standards, collaborating closely with engineering leads to define requirements and review builds. Beyond launch, I championed adoption by coaching designers, training teams, and partnering with engineering to introduce an intake process and governance model. My leadership fueled adoption, built momentum, and made Ingredients a cornerstone of ezCater’s product development culture.