Hyper- Personalized Engagement That Elevated Experience and Cut Costs

The Opportunity

A UK-based asset and wealth management firm aimed to deliver associates with employee-centric experiences by enabling seamless access to information and systems. They sought to leverage existing machine learning investments to hyper-personalize interactions for each individual associate.

Problem Space
Outdated tech, one size fits all — no personalisation beyond region, juggling multiple communication tools harming engagement and sense of belonging, excessive email reliance due to poor information findability & content governance and Platform vendor licensing cost soar.

Collaboration

Stakeholders from Corporate communication, Geo & department heads, HR, L&D, Technical Architects, Content writers, developers, QA and colleagues (end users) from across geography

Role & Responsibilities

Lead the product design and managed the experience design team, with the following responsibilities:
- Building Project Vision
- Research and Insights
- Business Capability Definition
- Validation and MVP finalisation
- Design Execution - UX & UI
- Design validation - Pre and post release

Success Metrics

Nominated for Microsoft Partner Awards under design honour category.
The organisation will save ~£0.25M per year on software license and operations cost.
Launch Day Impact—4,000+ unique employees engaged, 28,000+ page visits across desktop & mobile.
Mobile access boosted engagement after office hours & during commutes—previously non-existent.
High engagement on key sections, News Centre - 74% viewership, 7m 5s avg. time, Finance Systems - 4m 31s, Sustainable Investing Hub: 3m 6s, Investment News - 2m 14s

Design Process

We structured the design process to align diverse stakeholder needs and ensure a smooth transition from existing systems with minimal technical and political disruption.

UX Research

Multi-track Research

We used Atomic Research Methodology, for managing and organizing research knowledge, and split research into three tracks to capture user needs and support stakeholders in delivering the experience.

Enablers Track: Individuals who run the portal, IT teams, portal administrators, and communication teams
Communicators Track: Individuals who run the portal, IT teams, portal administrators, and communication teams
Colleagues Track: Content consumers (Colleagues) across various demographics geographies (UK,US,APAC & EMEA)

Key Research Activities & Insights

Some of the analytics data we gathered and analysed during our desk research.

The key activities and insights gathered during the discovery phase are outlined below

Secondary Research – Analyzed existing analytics for data-driven decisions.

We initiated the discovery with gathering and analysing the available analytics data. Which includes the existing portal analytics, recent colleague survey specific to the portal, also filtered out relevant data from yearly puls survey. This helped us in narrowing down on the focus areas for the other discovery activities.

Discovery Workshop – to achieve clarity & consensus, on business needs, vision, and project success.

The key learnings from the workshop are...

Value proposition

Show employees we listened
Demonstrate WIIFM
Promote the portal via campaigns
Spread colleague success stories

Motivations

Exit Obsolete Technology
Improve collaboration
Enhanced User Experience
Support One Org
Personalization
Cloud Migration
Mobile Access

Challenges

Stakeholder consensus
Accepting Change
Content Updating
Inability to translate on-prem features
Migration Complexities

Success factors

Enhanced Engagement
Intuitive navigation
Easy content creation
More colleague content
Streamlined communication
Efficient publishing workflow
Metrics to Measure utilization

Expectations

Seventy-five percent said they preferred the employee experience portal to function like a Swiss army knife, offering everything in one place, rather than like a kitchen knife, which focuses on a single task.

Leadership Briefing – Gained portal vision from Head of Colleague Communication.

The key focus areas from this briefing are:

Increase adoption through consumer grade experience.
Now it's one size fits all create a personalized experience.
Empower the communicators with better tools & processes

Stakeholder Discussions – In-person sessions with IT, Comms, L&D, and Content leads.

Stakeholders walked us through their current setup, processes, to get first–hand information on their aspirations, and pain points. We gathered the analytics data during discussions to make data driven decisions.

End User Interviews – One-on-one interviews across diverse employee demographics.

Interviewed associates from diverse functions, roles, and seniorities.
Participants included HR, IT, and Corporate Communications representatives.
Covered topics like portal expectations, intranet sentiments, tools usage, corporate communication, pain points, feedback mechanisms, engagement, & emotions.

Stakeholder Voice

Experience Mapping

Research Summary

Here is the summary of our research learnings post our careful analysis and synthesis, for each of the identified opportunity areas. These insights reflect key patterns, challenges, and opportunities that were uncovered through our analysis, providing a foundation for the strategic recommendations and next steps for the project.

As per Atomic Research, we summarized each opportunity area with insights, supporting facts, and recommendations.

Personas

Created user primary user personas based on end user interviews, analytics, and stakeholder input to reflect key portal usage patterns.

Defining Business Capabilities

Using research data, we defined business capabilities to support each opportunity area.

Feature Mapping

For each business capability, we identified essential features to realize its full value and benefits. These were validated with architects and developers for feasibility and cost, prioritized using an Effort vs. Impact Matrix, and secured stakeholder alignment through final review.

Low Fidelity Prototyping

Information Architecture - Tree Testing Validation

Conducted tree testing with scenarios to validate existing information architecture & assess navigation efficiency based on user mental models.

Results

Recommendations

Remove:
duplicate links (e.g., Financial Glossary, Locations, DEI)
PDFs from Development & Career; use quick links instead

Reorganize:
"Speak-up" → HR Information
"Volunteering" → People & Places
"Our Strategy" + "Our Business" → Single section

Move:
Purchasing/Payments → Procurement Hub
Finance System → Finance Hub
UK Workplace Hub → People & Places

Insights to Interfaces

These initial designs bridged abstract concepts and real interfaces, translating research insights into prototypes that guided evaluation and enabled collaborative iterations with stakeholders and end-users.

Home

Department

News

Article

Design Validation

Stakeholder Review & Usability Testing

Through rigorous validation with technical and business stakeholders, along with thorough end-user testing, we refined our concepts into their final form. This allowed us to strategically prioritize features, reserving more complex, resource-intensive enhancements to future phases.

High Fidelity Design

Interface & Interaction Design

Through rigorous validation with technical and business stakeholders, along with thorough end-user testing, we refined our concepts into their final form. This allowed us to strategically prioritize features, reserving more complex, resource-intensive enhancements to future phases.

(Click below designs to view its enlarged version and details)

Home

Department Page

News Page

Responsive Design

Dev Handover & Support

Design to Code Transition

Finalized and delivered organized design files, assets, and specifications.
Held a Q&A session to clarify design intent and user flows.
Provided ongoing support during implementation to address design questions.
Created and maintained the Design System for consistency and scalability.

Next Steps

Our Proposed Next Steps

Form a cross-functional focal point group to brainstorm features, collect feedback, and build the backlog.
For XLA based continuous improvement, use data-driven metrics and qualitative research.
Move towards One Front Door approach, by integrating information access from multiple enterprise systems
Improve content tagging to promote narrowcasting & personalized experiences.
Bring the portal into flow of the work by Integrating it to Teams/Slack to engage inactive associates.
Address competing shadow IT used by packets of employees to reduce information duplication and boost engagement.

Impact