Three Products, One Platform
Oracle’s first Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS): application integration, process automation and real-time analytics, delivered as one product. I 0-to-1 designed the analytics product, and migrated the other two onto a shared shell.
My Role
Sole Designer
The Problem
Coalescing three standalone products into a single platform
In 2015 Oracle had strong but isolated integration products: Application Integration and Process Automation. Customers using both were stitching them together themselves, across different interfaces, terminology and navigation, for work that should have been one continuous experience. Leadership wanted Oracle’s first Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS): one cloud platform combining Application Integration, Process Automation and business analytics.
The Unified Shell
Consistency & scalability, while preserving contextual moments
Through workshops, design reviews and customer interviews, we identified various commonalities across all products that could be aligned to create a unifying shell for the new Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) while maintaining each product’s context-specific interfaces and task flows, while also being scalable enough to facilitate additional cross-cutting features.
Video Demo
The shell in use: navigation system, branding bar, title bar and list views orchestrated to compose all three products into one platform.
Navigation System
A collapsible left panel with a mobile-style drill-down: one way to move across every product.
Homepage
Every product has a measured presence that changes with its availability, and with first-time or regular use.
Branding bar
Normalized across products: consistent branding, one navigation entry point, help and the user menu.
Title bar
One consistent header for every page in the platform.
List views
The most common view in every product. Standardizing it cut cognitive load and did more than anything else to make the platform feel like one.
Application Integration Canvas
Integration was a standalone product with its own workspace canvas for connecting to thousands of SaaS and on-premises applications seamlessly through 50+ native app and technology adapters. With its own tools, capabilities, terminology, and visual design that were unique to the product.
Canvas (before)
As it looked as a standalone product.
Canvas (after)
New branding bar, title bar, and canvas visual design and interactive pattern alignment.
Process Automation Canvas
Another standalone product with its own workspace canvas, Process Automation offers rapid design, automation, and business process management in the cloud. With its own tools, capabilities, terminology, and visual design that were unique to the product.
Canvas (before)
As it looked as a standalone product.
Canvas (after)
New branding bar, title bar, and canvas visual design and interactive pattern alignment.
Business Analytics (0-to-1)
Real-Time Business Insight (RTBI)
RTBI was a 0-to-1 product, offering no-code, business-friendly analytics tools that lets business users monitor processes in real time.
Dashboards work out of the box. Everything speaks in business terms, not event counts. And a business user can design and track real-time performance metrics and create custom dashboards alone, no engineering required.
Information Architecture
Mapping user task flows, setting the requirements for the navigation structure.
Messaging
Oracle's design system lacked standardized messaging patterns due to the huge quantity of unique contexts and constraints across the portfolio. Making it the responsibility of the product designer to establish them for each product.
Save Patterns
Oracle's design system lacked standardized save model patterns due to the huge quantity of unique contexts and constraints across the portfolio. Making it the responsibility of the product designer to establish them for each product.
Custom Dashboard
RTBI came with many out-of-the-box dashboards. And also supported the creation of custom dashboards.
Create Custom Dashboard
Built to enable business users to create dashboards by themselves without engineering support.
Accessibility
WCAG 2.1
WCAG 2.1WCAG 2.1 is the set of rules for making websites and apps work for people with disabilities. Meeting it is a legal requirement in industries like government, healthcare, and finance, which is where many of Oracle’s customers operate. To support them, Oracle builds products like Oracle Integration Cloud to meet these same standards, so customers can adopt them without accessibility getting in the way.
Top WCAG rules for OIC
Keyboard
Everything works from a keyboard alone, no traps, visible focus indicator, logical focus order.
Contrast
Text at 4.5:1 minimum (3:1 for large text); UI components and meaningful graphics at 3:1 against adjacent colors.
Color
Never the only way to convey information or state.
Text alternatives
Every image, icon, and control has a text equivalent.
Name, role, value
Custom components expose their name, role, and state programmatically so screen readers can announce them and their changes.
Structure in code
Headings, tables, and groupings conveyed visually are also exposed programmatically.
Design Governance
To keep the platform’s design consistent and high quality, a design governance council was formed. I was a founding member alongside the Alta design system team and senior engineers from all three product teams. The council ran office hours sessions and design audits across all product lines. I worked with the design system team to define fixes and delivered those fixes to engineering, acting as a bridge between design and engineering. The design audit results and log of known gaps was then used by leadership to decide when the platform MVP was ready to be released.
Navigation System
An audit finding flagged for correction and carried to engineering.
Branding bar
An audit finding flagged for correction and carried to engineering.
Title bar
An audit finding flagged for correction and carried to engineering.
Soft Skills
iPaaS was an organizational challenge before it was a design one
Left to right: Design Workshop, Design Presentations, Customer Interviews
Three standalone product teams (Product, Engineering, Leadership), each with its own customers, conventions, backlog and real reasons for why its existing UX was right. All had to agree on a combined information architecture, terminology, and design language while still continuing shipping their individual roadmaps.
Design was the common thread between them. I embedded myself into each team, joining meetings, understanding the nuances of each product and team, and capturing & scoping requirements. I became the point of contact between all three teams as well as a liaison for the design system team.
Running cross-team workshops, I was able to get all stakeholders together and help facilitate decision-making. Interviewing Customer Advisory Board (CAB) members to empathize with the customer’s perspective and became their a champion for their needs. Then validated design decisions with them through conducting 1:1 design review sessions.
Being the only designer working with approximately fifty engineers across all products, I took advantage of every opportunity to present to them in mass. Share out the design direction and rationales, bring visibility into the design process and current stage, and address their questions and concerns.
Earning the trust of each Product and Engineering team, becoming a champion for the end customer, and a valued partner to the design system team were the soft skills needed to ship the MVP.
Outcome
MVP was released in 2017 and is available today
Oracle’s first iPaaS, still shipping as Oracle Integration: a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader every year from 2018 to 2025, servicing customers including Cisco, Kroger and Subaru.
Three standalone products went in and one platform came out, on a shell built to take more than it was given. Oracle kept building on it, growing the platform into an integration family alongside Data Integration, GoldenGate, API Management, Streaming and Events.
Today, the platform is where Oracle is putting its agentic AI. In a single click, customers can turn an integration they already trust into an MCP server, handing agents the enterprise data and the predictable automation they need to act.
