3M™ Nucleus

Empowering digital evolution.

Companies that don’t evolve into great software companies will be replaced by those that do. 3M Nucleus was the manifestation of an effort to accelerate and simplify software delivery for the ongoing support and future enablement of 3M’s digital portfolio.

Despite being considered a material science and manufacturing company, 3M owns and maintains more than

150 digital products.

The problems

Fragmentation

The 3M digital brand was ad-hoc, fragmented, and lagging in design. Inconsistency hurts brand perception, loyalty, and end-user adoption.

Redundancy

With 3M structured as separate business groups, digital products exist without transparency, collaboration, and clear communication causing teams to create the same but different components repeatedly.

Slowness

Heavy bureaucratic processes, a general lack of autonomy, and information sprawl inhibited design and developer velocity.

Poor quality

Historically, developers designed digital applications, making for poor quality experiences. UX designers needed help impacting how deeply design is penetrating 3M’s massive portfolio.

Inaccessibility

When I came to 3M Design in 2016, accessibility was a term our chief design officer had never heard of, and 3M’s digital products were not inclusive to people with disabilities.

Attrition

Since 2019, retaining top UX design and development talent has been a struggle. Designers and developers want to spend more time creating innovative solutions and less time scaffolding common components.

How might we democratize the design and development practices at 3M and enable more collaboration between 3M Design and the Digital Science Center?

The central and most important part of an object, movement, or group, forming the basis for its activity and growth.

Nucleus began as a conversation between myself and my husband, a software engineer who also worked at 3M. Confronted with many of the same problems, we combined our skill sets to provide an application to bring together the design and deployment systems that we were individually working on. The goal was Nucleus, an inclusive centralized hub for engineers and designers to design, build, and deploy cloud applications utilizing the latest design and development patterns.

Accessibility

Educating and advocating for accessibility has always been a passion of mine. To operationalize accessibility into the process of designing and engineering, I created these “Accessibility Checklist” posters that align WCAG’s 2.1 AA criteria to the initial entry point where accessibility decisions are made and defined. In addition, building an accessible design system would ensure that the building blocks of all our digital products are WCAG 2.1 AA accessible and provide clear direction and patterns for constructing accessible user experiences.

Primitives and components

I spent a lot of time honing the brand primitives, building components, and leading other designers in this effort.

Managed language

Managed language is a significant, strategic benefit of the Nucleus design system. Is it a table or a grid? A region or a molecule? – and so on. The differences in vernacular from designers-to-developers, even designers-to-designers, are confusing. I believe design system language should align more closely with language in code. Regardless, managed language provides a shared understanding and nurtures consistent style, content, and behavior.

Final designs

Nucleus consists of two main applications: the design and deployment systems. I used a dark theme for the deployment system and a light theme for the design system as a nod to the yin yang relationship between the two.

I designed 3M Nucleus with the Nucleus Design System primitives, components, and patterns that I had established. The result is a simple, relevant design with a scalable architectural foundation.

Impact

Since its launch in 2022, Nucleus has become the de facto standard for how 3M deploys and supports new software applications. The design system is also being developed and implemented by a new team funded through my efforts within 3M’s Center of Excellence. The Nucleus UI Design Kit has been used to design over 35 experiences across all 3M’s business groups. More than 1100 developers and 450 teams use Nucleus to deploy over 1800 distinct software projects.