Discovery and Design Strategy
Context Gathering: Conducted early brainstorming sessions with internal designers from a previous uplift to surface stakeholder preferences, legacy decisions, and known pain points, using those insights to inform design direction and identify reusable patterns.
Site Structure Preservation: Maintained the existing site structure to preserve familiarity for returning visitors, focusing initial efforts on aligning component choices with updated design goals rather than rebuilding from scratch.
System Integration: Implemented a rebranded design system across all 26 pages, with core goals of resonating with the target market, improving consistency and usability, and reflecting a modern, premium visual identity. An existing testimonial component was adapted from the legacy system to align with new branding, built responsively across all breakpoints and documented through the full approval process.
Visual Differentiation: The primary challenge was avoiding visual repetition across a large site sharing a single component library, addressed through deliberate variation in layout, hierarchy, and visual rhythm while staying within system constraints.
Component Approach and Layout
Component Usage: Working within the constraints of an existing component library, each page's content was carefully evaluated to determine the best fit, finding new applications for existing components and expanding their use cases where needed. This strategic selection streamlined layout decisions, freed up time to focus on content refinement and hierarchy, and resulted in new systemic patterns that could be applied across the full site.
Navigation Support: Card modules played a central role in creating clear pathways between pages, improving navigation and discoverability across the microsite.
CTA Hierarchy: Established and advocated for a clear CTA hierarchy across the site. The primary action, career search, was featured in global navigation and hero banners. The secondary CTA, joining the talent network, was intentionally placed at the end of every page to capture users who scrolled without converting. This placement was challenged during the project but backed by the design team and held through to launch.
Consistency in Interaction: Button copy followed UX writing best practices, keeping labels action-based and concise to reduce cognitive load and improve scannability, applied consistently across all pages to minimize decision friction.
Visual Styling and Content Hierarchy
Color Theming and Visual Cues: Applied deliberate color theming to distinguish between audience segments while maintaining brand consistency. Drawing on available brand colors and heading specifications within the new design system, I mapped distinct colors to each section, new advisors, corporate professionals, and early careers, carrying those colors through from section front pages to child page hero banners. This allowed users to quickly identify their intended section at a glance, improving content relevance and reducing navigation friction across a large site.
Readability and Scannability: Content organization was a significant focus throughout. Line lengths were shortened, spacing adjusted, and content reordered for clarity and hierarchy. Accordion components collapsed dense sections without losing detail, while article highlight components and multicolumn layouts visually uplifted content for easier browsing and reduced cognitive load.
Scaling and Outcomes
Scalability Across Pages: With 26 unique pages, each layout and component decision had to scale holistically across the full site. Patterns were refined early and applied consistently to maintain alignment and reduce inconsistencies throughout.
Stakeholder Collaboration: Refined layouts through iterative feedback sessions with content teams and section owners. Image selections for the homepage were made within brand compliance and ratio constraints, balancing stakeholder requests with system limitations to land on the strongest solution.
Reception and Results: The redesign was presented to an audience of 80, including product owners, content teams, section owners, and design leadership. Reception was overwhelmingly positive, with the Director of UX noting that the project demonstrated strong design and UX thinking that went well beyond a visual refresh, delivering a scalable, intentional experience that felt relevant and intuitive across every page.
