Led the redesign of a large-scale enterprise intranet supporting 30,000+ associates across a global organization.
This project focused on untangling complex content, aligning stakeholders around a shared product vision, and translating deep user research into a scalable design system that improved discoverability, usability, and long-term maintainability of the platform.
Impact
What drove our strategy...
Goals
- Reduce reliance on support by enabling effective self-service
- Improve findability and user confidence across critical workflows
- Deliver a search experience that meets modern web expectations
User Frustrations
- Search was unreliable, returning unexpected or irrelevant results
- Failed search forced users into complex navigation, leading to confusion and overwhelm
- The dashboard surfaced too much undifferentiated information at once
- Users expected personalized content based on role, location, and business unit—but received none
Personas
- Associates – Front-line employees who needed quick, confident access to policies, tools, and communications to complete daily work.
- Managers – Store and department leaders who relied on the HUB for oversight, performance tracking, and supporting their teams.
Where do we start?
Competitive Analysis
We took time to look at other competitors in the intranet space to make sure our redesigns would align with common mental models and design patterns used elsewhere. We also took of common features as well as potential UX or design failings we could improve upon.
Understanding User Behavior
We used heatmapping and session recordings to understand how users actually interacted with the existing intranet. This data revealed critical insights about navigation patterns, frequently accessed features, and areas of frustration that weren't captured in interviews alone.
User Research
We performed generative research to define user pain points using 1:1 live remote user interviews. This research was conducted with 26 participants that represented various roles and types of users.
Observation
The Hub’s home page is “cluttered,” “too much,” and “overwhelming”
Recommendation
- Consider an audit of the most visited policies/documents and make them readily available
- Use IA analysis to define the content the associate needs then focus on wants
"The navigation is overwhelming and confusing but I have to use it because search doesn't really work."
"I pretty much ignore everything on this page and just use a couple of shortcuts because everything is outdated and rarely applies to me."
"The Hub seems overly focused on HQ. I want to see information that's personalized to me and more specific to my location and/or department."
"There's always so much content on the homepage but a lot is outdated. Sometimes I just want to find to watch the recording of the last all hands and can't."
Observation
The search experience was the most cited pain point due to duplicated results, outdated content, and incomplete results.
Recommendation
- Meet user expectations by modeling after best-in-class services like Google
- Search results should reflect who created the document, policy, or information
- Regularly analyze and cleanse information available to users to get rid of old, duplicate, or inaccurate resources
"I find The HUB generally confusing and hard to navigate so I use Search but it usually doesn't work the way I expect or results I get are not current and I just end up contacting support or have my manager find what I was looking for."
What did we
learn?
Redesign Homepage and Nav
The overall feelings from users is that navigation and the home page are cluttered, confusing, and overwhelming leading to lack engagement and excessive support calls.
Fix Search
How Search worked simply didn't match users' expectations. We need to make this match current best-in-class experiences and do a full content audit to remove stale information from our help articles and resources.
Personalize the HUB experience for users
Users expect the experience to be more personalized and see information on their home page, and other pages, be customized to their role, location, and business unit. Users want to log in and see relevant information as soon as possible.
Early FigJam Collaboration with UX, Product, and Engineering
I started a FigJam file based on research takeaways. I wanted to start with something low-fi to encourage stakeholder collaboration through commenting or low-fi design ideation. Some user feedback you'll see represented are having content personalized and customizable, shortcuts for most used areas of the portal, surfacing latest and most important information at the top, reducing clutter in the navigation, and more.
Final Visual Designs
We modernized the entire interface to align with new brand guidelines and user expectations.
Dashboard
All News
Article
Search
Find People
My HR
Measuring and Validating Designs
We conducted unmoderated research using UserTesting.com with a subset of our previous participants in the generative research study.
homepage
- Overall feedback was positive with words like "simple", "clean", and "easy to use" used
- New shortcuts section was well received and users liked the customizability
- Don't rename any of the shortcuts as it's confusing
search
- Add being able to filter by category
- Was positively received as much more usable but also technically more functional
Results and Reflection
This project was difficult to lead at times as there were product owners who didn't know what they really wanted and hadn't led a project like this before. This required patience and a fair amount of leadership on my part as UX to help guide and shape the requirements and goals of the project as it progressed.
"I LOVE the new look on the HUB. I'm very excited and wanted to share how much more user friendly it is!"
"HR can be difficult to work with sometimes and we didn't always have a clear vision initially. You were able to help curate best practices and create example vision ideas that were instrumental to us helping get this new vision together."
"Without your work, we would have been extremely lost! As far as I'm concerned, that page should have your signature on it with pride when we are done."
