Outcome
Established an enterprise-wide approach to addressing digital design regulations in a consistent and scalable way.
Strategy
Opportunity
Europe's Digital Services Act introduced sweeping transparency requirements. Minimal design guidance. Non-compliance risked 6% of Microsoft's global revenue. The challenge: Meet vague requirements without eroding trust or breaking design systems. Build a framework that scales to future regulations.
Approach
We didn't treat DSA as a checklist. We built a system-level design response.
A system-level response required:
Shared principles instead of one-off interpretations
Clear guardrails for fast decisions without escalation
Transparency that balances legal compliance with clarity
Alignment & Validation
Early DSA work revealed a classic failure mode. Designers in silos, optimizing for speed, unintentionally fragmenting patterns. Copy varied. Transparency approaches varied. Core principles varied. The result: confused stakeholders and compromised frameworks.
Alignment
X-Designer Collaboration Workshops
Facilitated workshops across products to surface DSA failure modes. Inconsistent transparency standards. Conflicting guest vs. member treatments. Unclear escalation boundaries causing bottlenecks.
Leadership Project Reviews
Consolidated 15+ fragmented designer reviews into unified executive presentations. Shared context enabled faster legal alignment and on-time delivery.
Risks
Risk
Legal compliance over user experience
De-risk
Reframed DSA as unmet user needs for transparency and safety. Not regulatory checkboxes.
Risk
Non-DSA designers violating new standards
De-risk
Created shared training with Legal team to onboard designers joining the project mid-stream.
Risk
Not scaling to future regulations
De-risk
Designed reusable trust guidelines, not DSA-specific patterns. Partnered with Legal to make them durable.
Key Decisions
System vs. screen-by-screen fixes
Tension
Teams wanted quick patches per requirement; Business wanted to meet minimum standards.
Decision: System
Slower upfront, faster and safer at scale.
Outcome
Enabled teams to meet DSA deadline months early while reducing designer-legal escalations and maintaining consistency across 10 business areas.
Global approach vs. EU-only compliance
Tension
Legal initially favored minimum EU compliance; Design disagreed
Decision: Mixed
Global patterns with geo adaptations, anticipating future regulations.
Outcome
No need to rebuild patterns region-by-region as regulations expand. Saved an estimated 4 months of design and engineering work.
Designer autonomy vs. consistency
Tension
Teams pushed back on centralized design guidance, viewing it as a bottleneck.
Decision: Consistency
Brought designers together to co-create shared standards rather than impose top-down rules, then documented them as org-wide guidelines.
Outcome
200+ designers adopted the guidelines as single source of truth. Eliminated rework. Delivered coordinated experience faster than siloed approaches could.
My Deliverables
Trust Design Hub
This internal site featured: • Design and content guidelines • User treatment standards • Trust project library • Deceptive pattern overview
Design training
Led design training with 200+ designers on regulation design
My Role
Project responsibilities:
DSA compliance lead: 6 design teams, design reviews, Legal partnership
Cross-team alignment: Guidelines, workshops, shared standards
Pattern creation: Initial flows (reporting, transparency) adopted org-wide
Compliance fails when you design it screen by screen. Trust and regulation scale only as systems.