Building one design system to unify a fragmented healthcare experience. How Oak Theory led the redesign of Optum's pharmacy website and built its design pattern library — replacing scattered, inconsistent UX with a single source of truth and a faster path from design to development.
Quick answer
Oak Theory is a web design, development, and branding studio that redesigned Optum's pharmacy experience and built its design pattern library — a single source of truth spanning tokens, components, and usage guidelines in Figma, structured for direct handoff into Contentful. By leading design and speaking developers' language directly, Oak Theory replaced fragmented, inconsistent UX with one unified system and dramatically faster design-to-development handoff.
About
Optum's pharmacy site serves patients filling and managing prescriptions. Like many large healthcare platforms, it had grown through many hands — multiple designers, multiple UX contributors, and multiple design guides living in different places. Everyone was trying to speak one language, but there was no single source of truth to speak it from.
Oak Theory's founder joined as creative lead to direct and navigate that complexity, then brought the Oak Theory team in to expand the scope of what could get built. Over roughly a year, a team of four to five worked across design and development to elevate the existing pharmacy experience, unify its visual language, and build the system that would keep it consistent going forward.
The challenge
With multiple design guides scattered across the organization, the same button, layout, or interaction could look and behave several different ways depending on who built it and when. At the start, the site carried roughly six different CTA button styles alone.
The job was to bring all of it under one roof — one language, one source of truth.
What we did
The first move was consolidation. Instead of many competing design guides, Oak Theory established a single, authoritative system everyone could build from. That alone resolved most of the inconsistency at the root rather than page by page.
Inspired by the rigor of IBM's Carbon design system, the DPL was broken all the way down to atoms — tokens, components, and clear usage guidelines, all built out in Figma. Critically, it was structured so developers could grab exactly what they needed and assemble modules directly in Contentful.
The library wasn't a reference document that sat on a shelf. It was a working tool wired into how the site actually gets built.
Because Oak Theory's lead understood development directly, design decisions could be pressure-tested with engineers in real time — what was feasible, what was fast, what would actually ship.
Working inside Contentful together closed the usual gap between "handed off" and "built," and let the team move remarkably fast.
PDP and checkout were reworked around clearer information hierarchy and layout. The team refined how patients move through the flow, tested how to introduce features like coupon opt-ins, and removed elements that added friction rather than value — simplifying the path to completing a prescription.
Oak Theory introduced a dynamic search menu designed for how patients actually think. Someone who can't spell a medication, or who doesn't know the drug name and simply types "cold medication," gets guided toward the right destination.
The result meets patients wherever they enter, and points them to a solution rather than a dead end.
Selected work
The Results
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CTA styles consolidated into one
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Single source of truth for design
FAQ
Oak Theory builds design systems and healthcare web experiences that unify how teams design and how developers build.
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