The impact of silos.
A site audit that changed how the design team works and strengthened our brand.
My role
Contributions: Independent site audit, design crit program proposal, design debt backlog establishment
The hunch
A 2023 reorg significantly reduced the design org and eliminated the journey team structure we had. Designers who had been heads-down in their own slice of the product were suddenly working as one team.
I'd been wondering for a while what the siloed structure had been doing to the site itself. The reorg felt like the right moment to find out. My hunch was that it looked like five different websites. I did an audit to see if I was right.
Complete audit of the site revealed significant design drift.
Driveway didn’t have a cohesive brand. It looked like five different websites.
Inconsistent typography, border radius, illustration style, and more.
The findings
The audit confirmed it. Pages designed by different journey teams had drifted significantly from each other. Different type treatments, inconsistent component usage, spacing that had nothing to do with the design system. The product looked like it had been built by five teams that never talked to each other.
The most dramatic examples weren't edge cases. They were core pages. The kind customers land on every day.
The Guides and Tips Category pages had the same layout as My Driveway.
Here’s the Guides and Tips page using design system components and matching the My Driveway page layout.
Small details can make a big impact
Some of the most outdated pages didn't need a redesign. They needed the design system applied consistently. Updated typography, correct spacing, the right components in the right places. Changes that take hours, not sprints.
The before and after speaks for itself.
Here’s the Guides and Tips landing page with design system components and typography and color updates.
Here are the updated Guide and Tips pages next to our FAQ landing page with much stronger brand cohesion.
Brand drift doesn't happen all at once. It happens one team at a time.
What changed
Two things came out of this audit:
A mandatory twice weekly design crit where work moves through at every stage so the whole team sees what's being built and how it's evolving.
A design debt backlog, giving the team a structured way to chip away at inconsistencies when capacity allows.
The site still isn't perfect. But the team now has the visibility, the forum, and the queue to keep it moving in the right direction.