CVS Health App

⭐️ 4.8 App Store Rating | 60M+ Users | iOS - Android - Web

Company:  CVS Health
Duration:  April 2024 – Present
Team:  Community Design Team & Creative Direction Council
My Role:  Senior Product Designer – Design Systems 

Case Study: Designing Consistency at Scale

Building Foundational UI for CVS Health

Overview

As a Senior Product Designer at CVS Health, I collaborated with cross-functional teams to shape and scale foundational design systems that power the brand's vast digital ecosystem, including the CVS Health mobile app and internal tools.

My work focused on systematizing consistency, improving design quality across teams, and delivering scalable solutions that balanced business needs with user experience. From component architecture to UX flows and mobile optimization, I operated at the intersection of design, collaboration, and technical integrity—ensuring all teams spoke the same visual language in a complex, multi-platform environment.

Preview: What You'll See

In this case study, I’ll walk you through some of my work at CVS Health, where I contributed to scaling and refining the user experience across a vast digital ecosystem. Here are the key areas I’ll cover:

Product Listing Page – Modular Commerce
Snackbar – Feedback UX
Error Logic UX – Offline States
Creative Direction Council – Design Leadership

These projects helped streamline workflows, improve usability, and deliver cohesive design across a multi-platform experience that reaches millions of CVS Health customers.

Overview

At CVS Health, the Product Listing Page (PLP) is a cornerstone of the retail experience, displaying a vast range of products and services—from health essentials to everyday items. Given the size and scope of CVS’s offerings and the complex digital ecosystem, CVS needed a flexible, scalable PLP solution that could be used across both mobile and web platforms.

In this section, I’ll walk you through the challenge of creating a unified, adaptable component, the design process I led to bring it to life, the collaborative efforts involved, and the outcome that allowed CVS Health to streamline its product listing experience across millions of users.

The Challenge

CVS needed a flexible and scalable Product Listing Page (PLP) component to support its retail health experience across both mobile and web platforms. With a large design team working in parallel and the mobile app in active development, creating a reliable, reusable UI component was critical to ensure cohesion, efficiency, and visual integrity.

Without a unified PLP system, teams risked bloated timelines, inconsistent retail UX, and design debt that would’ve slowed down product delivery across the app ecosystem.

My Role

As part of the Community Design Team, I led the design of the PLP modular component in Figma, ensuring it worked seamlessly across iOS, Android, and web platforms while aligning with CVS Health’s design language.

The challenge was to make the component flexible for mobile apps and scalable for web use, all while meeting various business needs—like sales, member benefits, and RX use. I worked closely with UX, engineering, and stakeholders to:

• Design responsive variants for iOS, Android, and web
• Define interaction rules for diverse use cases (e.g., retail, sales, RX)
• Build flexible layouts with side-panel controls and adjustable banners
• Ensure accessibility and spacing for mobile and desktop

The Work

The PLP component was designed to be flexible enough to accommodate variations like:

• Sale banners and promotional offers
• Dynamic pricing structures
• Detailed product information
• Mobile vs. desktop responsiveness
• Configurable side-panel controls for internal teams

I documented these variations and built a streamlined control interface in Figma, enabling easy configuration and smooth handoff for development.

Flexible, reusable PLP configurations built for consistency across CVS mobile and web platforms.

Centralized PLP controls ensured scalable configuration and alignment across mobile and web.

Custom dropdown controls empowered teams to toggle banners, savings messages, and pricing logic with precision and ease.

Detailed spacing guides ensured pixel-perfect precision and brand consistency across all PLP variants.

The Outcome

The final PLP component was successfully integrated into the CVS Health mobile app, driving a more cohesive UI and reducing visual inconsistencies across platforms. By streamlining the design process and enabling component reuse, we cut down redundant design cycles, saving 10+ hours of design and development time per sprint.

Today, the PLP component continues to power product views across the live app, supporting thousands of retail items in a consistent, brand-aligned layout. With over 60 million users engaging with the CVS Health app, the component plays a critical role in delivering a seamless user experience across both mobile and desktop platforms.

Overview

In a high-volume retail environment like CVS Health, clear, timely, and unobtrusive communication is key. I contributed to the design and refinement of lightweight UX patterns—specifically, snack bars—to deliver micro-messaging that supports contextual communication throughout the user journey. These snack bars are crucial for reinforcing actions, surfacing system feedback, and maintaining user trust, all without interrupting the user flow.

The Challenge

The CVS Health digital platform needed a unified, scalable approach to in-app notifications that didn’t rely on modal disruptions or heavy UI. Existing components lacked flexibility and weren’t systematized for broader use cases across mobile and web. The challenge was to create a snack bar solution that could adapt to various use scenarios while aligning with the broader design system and accessibility standards.

My Role 

Working within the Community Design Team, I led the visual and interaction design for new snack bar components. I collaborated with cross-functional designers and engineers to define behavior patterns, system states, and content limits for each message type (e.g., success, error, info). I also supported documentation efforts to ensure the pattern could be adopted at scale across internal teams.

I also tackled tricky UX edge cases like message stacking, auto-dismiss timing, and conflicting messaging across flows—ensuring clarity without cognitive overload.

Key Outcomes

• Designed and delivered a new snack bar component integrated into the CVS design system.
• Ensured accessibility compliance and responsiveness across devices.
• Enabled faster implementation of user feedback loops within the retail app and improving UX consistency. 
• Reducing engineering time spent on bespoke solutions. 

Overview 

Following my work on persistent snackbars, I identified a larger systemic UX issue: internet connectivity errors were being handled inconsistently across different lines of business within the CVS app ecosystem. Retail, pharmacy, photo, and health services all had unique patterns—some surfaced vague error messages, others failed silently, and some left users guessing whether the issue was on their end or ours.

As CVS continued to scale and unify its digital platforms, it became clear that we needed a single, scalable UX solution to handle data loss across the board. Users deserve a seamless experience, especially when things go wrong. I set out to bring clarity, consistency, and calm to moments of disconnection.

In a healthcare app where timing and trust are critical, users experiencing random drop-offs could mean more than just UX friction—it could mean missed refills, delayed care, or lost revenue. I wasn’t just solving for error states. I was safeguarding user confidence.

The Challenge 

Designing for failure states—like no internet—is notoriously tricky. We needed a system that could:

• Detect and communicate different types of connectivity issues (e.g., weak Wi-Fi, airplane mode, etc)
• Provide actionable, platform-appropriate feedback without overwhelming users.
• Scale across multiple business units, each with their own tech stack and release cadence.
• Seamlessly integrate with both native OS modals (iOS, Android) and CVS-specific UI components.
• Ensure accessibility and cross-platform clarity.

This wasn’t just a visual problem—it was a systemic experience design problem that demanded logic, empathy, and strong design architecture.

My Role 

As the sole UX designer tackling this problem at the time, I:

• Audited existing patterns across the app to identify inconsistencies
• Facilitated cross-functional interviews with PMs and dev leads across multiple product lines
• Mapped the entire ecosystem of disconnection events—user-initiated, OS-level, and server-side

• Created a comprehensive UX flow covering:
  • All known disconnection scenarios
  • Detection logic and responsibility ownership
  • Appropriate user-facing responses (snackbars, modals, banners)
• Designed app screen mockups paired with OS-native components to visualize integrated flows
• Advocated for and presented the unified flow to central design leadership

Outcomes 

Unified Logic Flow:
Delivered a master UX logic diagram used by engineering and product teams to standardize error-handling behavior.

Design Alignment:
Helped align multiple teams toward using the same UI patterns for connection issues—snackbars for transient losses, modals for persistent/system-wide failures.

Improved User Trust:
The new patterns emphasized transparency and clarity, reinforcing trust during moments when apps typically leave users confused.

Overview

In large organizations, design consistency isn't automatic—it’s defended.
At CVS, I served on the Central Design Council, a cross-functional team responsible for upholding design quality, accessibility, and brand integrity across mobile and web platforms.

I didn’t just QA files—I helped enforce standards, mentor designers, and advocate for systemic thinking. My role was part governance, part guidance: reviewing Figma files for design system fidelity, native platform alignment, and UX clarity. I pushed teams beyond “using the system” toward thinking in systems, helping unify the product experience at scale.

Challenge

Designers were creating components and layouts in siloed ways—leading to pattern inconsistencies, wasted effort, and user confusion.

My Role

Reviewed Figma files from multiple product teams weekly. Provided guidance on grid usage, spacing, mobile responsiveness, and accessible variants. Ensured teams used the design system correctly and flagged patterns needing updates.

Outcome

Helped maintain a unified UX language across CVS’s digital products. Served as a key voice bridging product teams across the different lines of business for app and web.

What Working at CVS Taught Me

Working across a massive enterprise like CVS Health challenged me to think beyond individual flows and start solving at a systems level. As I moved between different product verticals—from retail to internal tools—I saw firsthand how inconsistency, siloed design decisions, and unclear UX ownership can impact the overall customer experience.

What started as component-level design work (like snackbars or PLP patterns) quickly became opportunities to influence broader design systems and patterns used across teams.

Key Lessons:

• Designing at scale requires more than clean UIs—it’s about building clarity, alignment, and reusability into everything you make.
• Cross-functional influence becomes just as important as pixels; communication, documentation, and onboarding materials drive real adoption.
• Resilient systems come from deeply understanding business constraints, user expectations, and edge cases that break consistency.
• Sometimes the smallest patterns (like a snackbar) can become the foundation for much bigger systemic change.

This project deepened my ability to think in systems, lead through ambiguity, and advocate for thoughtful UX governance—even in environments where design maturity is still growing. 

This work sharpened my ability to lead through ambiguity, build adoption across silos, and architect UX systems that don’t just look good—but endure. I’m ready to scale that impact even further.

"...Extremely knowledgeable about native components..."

Sandy — Senior Product Designer, CVS Health
September 13, 2024

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