Tressa Barnard

Principal UX Designer specializing in Design Systems at Oracle. I build the infrastructure of products — the patterns, rules, and documented decisions that let teams ship with consistency at scale.

Redwood Page Header Redesign
Oracle · 2025 Password protected

Redesigned the core page header for Oracle's Redwood Design System, introducing content-aware responsive behavior that raised the quality bar across tens of millions of users worldwide.

In-App Navigation with Dismissible Tabs
Oracle · 2026 Password protected

Enhancing a component I originally designed — research-backed selection clarity, icon + text configurations for dismissible tabs, AI messaging support, and expanded tab capacity for complex enterprise workflows.

Overflow Guidelines
Oracle · 2022–2023 Password protected

A system-wide UX guideline defining how overflow should work across actions, navigation, content, and text — replacing inconsistent, ad hoc decisions with a shared framework and filing seven component-level JIRAs to implement it.

Taste is irreplaceable

It comes from decisions, mistakes, and learning why. You cannot skip that foundation — and AI cannot build it for you.

Generative UI is here

The job is shifting from screens to agents, guidelines, and outcomes. In that world, AI is the new power user of design systems. It doesn't intuit past ambiguous tokens or underdocumented patterns the way a human designer might. That raises the bar for systems thinking in ways I find genuinely energizing.

Precision in = precision out

AI is only as good as what it knows and what you tell it to do. Vague asks produce vague results. Designing for AI is designing for the most literal possible reader.

You still have to read

AI-generated output is only useful if a human actually owns it. Skipping that step doesn't save time — it creates risk.

Human-centered thinking isn't going away

AI can't tell you what the problem is. Not all problems should be solved with AI. That judgment is yours.

I'm a Principal UX Designer specializing in Design Systems at Oracle, where I own the stewardship and evolution of core foundational patterns for the Redwood Design System — acting as a horizontal partner to product teams across the organization.

My work lives at the intersection of structure and nuance: figuring out how components behave across contexts, how patterns hold up under edge cases, and how documentation empowers teams to build consistently without losing flexibility.

Before Oracle, I spent time at Boeing designing software for commercial and defense manufacturing — complex, high-stakes environments where clarity and precision aren't nice-to-haves. That grounding shapes how I think about every system I build.

BS in Human Centered Design and Engineering, University of Washington.

Principal UX DesignerOracle
2025–Present
Senior UX DesignerOracle
2022–2025
UX DesignerOracle
2021–2022
UX DesignerBoeing
2018–2021
UX InternFamilyCare Inc
2017
BS, Human Centered Design & EngineeringUniversity of Washington
2014–2018

Let's make something worth using.

hello@tressabarnard.com LinkedIn