The XD Library: A Resource Hub Organized the Way Designers Actually Think

The Problem

Design resources (tokens, UI patterns, accessibility documentation) were scattered across tools, docs, and Slack threads with no central home. There was no single place a designer could go to find what already existed; finding anything depended on knowing the right person to ask, which meant constant reinvention and inconsistency across teams.

The Process

Explore the live, interactive demo ↗

Open a resource to see its full detail and review history — not just the card preview.

Centralizing the content was the easy part. The harder problem was structuring it so designers could actually find what they needed at enterprise scale, which meant starting with research into how design specialists, not generalists, actually categorize and think about information.

The Decision

Rather than impose a generic or engineering-driven taxonomy, the library’s IA was built around design specialty: the way designers already organized their own work. Getting that structure right was the lever that made the library both findable and easy enough to contribute to.

The Outcome

• 1,000+ viewers within two weeks of launch
• 54 new contributions within three months, submitted through an in-library intake form
• Became the enterprise’s central design resource hub, and helped enable HCD workshops for 1,000+ Product and Tech partners

Reflection

The easy failure mode for a project like this is treating it as a content problem: just put the docs somewhere. The real work was the taxonomy decision, and that’s the part that made people actually come back and contribute.

See this site’s own design system → The real type scale, tokens, and components behind this portfolio, built with the same instinct for structure as the library above (not a recreation of the original).