REDWOOD
Helping users fall in love, one interaction at a time.
Redwood is Oracle’s next-generation design system and experience platform for Cloud Applications. I led research and experience strategy to help shape its foundations, using human insight, behavioral evidence, and experience measurement to create a more cohesive, learnable, accessible, and performant experience at enterprise scale.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Oracle’s Cloud Applications span extraordinary functional breadth and depth across HCM, ERP, SCM, Procurement, and Customer Experience.
Redwood created an opportunity to build a more connected and coherent experience across the suite, organized around how people actually work.
At the scale of Oracle’s portfolio, the design system provided a powerful point of leverage, enabling improvements made at the foundation to systematically improve experience quality across the portfolio.
THE KEY INSIGHT
Research across the portfolio consistently reinforced the value customers placed on the breadth and sophistication of Oracle’s applications.
We focused on making that power easier to access: connecting experiences around how people work, creating patterns that became familiar over time, building accessibility into the foundations, grounding performance in human experience, and establishing a continuous learning loop between what we designed and what customers actually experienced.
MY ROLE + IMPACT
Redwood created an opportunity to expand the role of research. I focused the organization on the foundational decisions that could improve experience quality across the portfolio.
Research brought customer evidence into the design of the system itself, shaping how experiences connected, the patterns people learned, how accessibility and performance were addressed, and how we measured what happened once products reached customers.
CREATING GREATER COHESION + STANDARDIZING PATTERNS
Built a taxonomy of the patterns of work carried out across our products, which helped shape reusable templates around how people actually work. Then, through behavioral telemetry, showed how work moved across the suite, specifically where people had to carry context between experiences themselves.
Those insights helped identify opportunities to connect information, workflows, and actions, creating greater cohesion across the portfolio and shifting more of that work from the user to the system.
ACCESSIBILITY
Brought the lived experiences of people with disabilities, especially those with visual impairments and neurodivergence, directly into the design of foundational components and principles.
Those insights shaped design-system choices, complemented by guidance for designers, developers, and implementers where the foundation alone couldn’t solve the problem. This helped shift accessibility from downstream remediation toward prevention and reduced the accessibility backlog by more than half over two years.
PERFORMANCE
Established a new approach to measuring application performance that was more aligned with people’s actual experience, rather than conflating the experience with backend processes that inevitably have to occur and can inflate traditional performance measures.
This gave teams a clearer way to understand, diagnose, and act on performance across the portfolio. Performance became part of how we measured experience quality, alongside its role as a technical measure.
We also expanded the definition of performance beyond technical indicators to include how customers actually experienced the application. These experience-based measures became part of how we assessed quality across the portfolio, connecting system performance with the realities of customer workflows.
BEHAVIORAL EVIDENCE
Introduced behavioral telemetry to understand how experiences performed once they reached customers, creating an ongoing evidence loop between what was designed, how it was actually used, and what should improve next.
This work ultimately evolved into Oracle Signals, extending behavioral evidence into a broader product-intelligence capability.
