Role: Director, User Experience & Digital Marketing
Responsibilities: UX strategy, product design, user research, information architecture, design systems, branding, digital marketing, and executive collaboration
Responsibilities: UX strategy, product design, user research, information architecture, design systems, branding, digital marketing, and executive collaboration
Overview
AtWork Systems provided a broad suite of enterprise applications supporting critical business functions, including finance, accounting, human resources, project management, time and expense reporting, procurement, and payroll.
Although these capabilities were part of the same product ecosystem, they had evolved into 12 separate systems. Each application had its own workflows, terminology, navigation, and interface conventions. Users often had to move between disconnected experiences to complete related tasks, making the platform harder to learn and more difficult to use efficiently.
As Director of User Experience and Digital Marketing, I led the effort to transform these separate applications into a more cohesive enterprise platform. My work extended beyond redesigning individual screens. It required establishing a shared experience strategy, understanding the needs of multiple user groups, aligning stakeholders, and creating reusable standards that could support the entire product ecosystem.
The Challenge
The platform supported complex workflows for employees, managers, project leaders, finance teams, HR professionals, and administrators. Each group entered the system with different responsibilities, technical knowledge, and expectations.
The fragmented product experience created several challenges:
• Navigation and terminology varied between applications.
• Similar actions behaved differently across products.
• Users had to learn multiple interface patterns.
• Information was organized around individual systems rather than user goals.
• Product teams lacked a shared set of experience and design standards.
• New features risked adding even more inconsistency.
• Leadership needed a unified product vision without disrupting essential business operations.
The central design question became:
How could we turn 12 specialized business applications into one understandable experience while preserving the depth and flexibility required by enterprise users?
My Role
I served as the primary UX and digital strategy leader, working directly with executive leadership and partnering across product, engineering, marketing, operations, and customer-facing teams.
My responsibilities included:
• Defining the platform’s UX strategy and product experience principles
• Establishing customer research and Voice of the Customer practices
• Mapping workflows across interconnected business functions
• Creating the platform’s information architecture
• Designing user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and production interfaces
• Developing reusable patterns and design-system standards
• Facilitating stakeholder alignment and design reviews
• Supporting implementation through ongoing collaboration with engineering
• Connecting the product experience with the company’s brand, website, content, and customer communications
I worked as both a strategic leader and a hands-on designer, moving between executive planning, customer research, detailed interaction design, and implementation guidance.
Research and Discovery
The first step was understanding how people actually used the platform.
Because the software served multiple roles, a single workflow could cross several departments and applications. I combined qualitative and quantitative research methods to identify the points where users experienced the most friction.
Research methods included:
• Customer interviews
• Usability testing
• Surveys and focus groups
• Product and website analytics
• Workflow analysis
• Stakeholder interviews
• Customer feedback and support themes
• Journey mapping
Rather than examining each application in isolation, I mapped the relationships between them. This revealed where users had to change context, repeat actions, interpret inconsistent terminology, or search for information that should have been readily available.
The research helped shift internal conversations away from individual features and toward complete user journeys.
Defining the Experience Strategy
I established a set of principles to guide the platform’s evolution:
One platform, not 12 products: The experience needed to feel like a connected ecosystem, even when users moved between highly specialized business functions.
Organize around user goals: Navigation and workflows needed to reflect what users were trying to accomplish, not the internal structure of the software.
Consistency reduces complexity: Common actions, controls, terminology, and feedback patterns needed to work predictably throughout the platform.
Preserve power without exposing unnecessary complexity: Enterprise users needed access to sophisticated capabilities, but the interface did not need to present every option with equal prominence.
Build reusable solutions: Design decisions needed to become shared patterns that could improve current applications and accelerate future development.
These principles gave product and engineering teams a common framework for evaluating decisions.
Creating a Unified Information Architecture
One of the most important parts of the initiative was developing an information architecture that could accommodate 12 interconnected systems.
I reviewed how features were categorized, how users moved between functional areas, and where the existing structure reflected internal product divisions instead of recognizable user tasks.
The redesigned architecture introduced:
• A consistent platform-level navigation model
• Clearer relationships between major business functions
• Standard terminology across applications
• Predictable page structures and interaction patterns
• More direct access to frequently used tasks
• Better contextual connections between related workflows
This provided users with a stable mental model. Once they learned how one part of the platform worked, they could apply that knowledge elsewhere.
Designing the Unified Experience
With the experience strategy and architecture established, I translated the findings into user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and interface designs.
The design work focused on:
• Simplifying high-frequency tasks
• Reducing unnecessary steps
• Standardizing forms, tables, filters, dashboards, and navigation
• Clarifying system status and user feedback
• Making dense business information easier to scan
• Supporting different levels of user experience and authority
• Creating responsive experiences for web and mobile use
• Maintaining consistency across finance, HR, project, procurement, payroll, and administrative workflows
Interactive prototypes allowed stakeholders and users to evaluate workflows before engineering committed significant development time. Testing these concepts early helped identify confusing interactions and provided concrete evidence for design decisions.
Establishing a Design System
A unified platform required more than a collection of redesigned screens. It needed a shared design language.
I developed reusable standards for:
• Typography and color
• Buttons and form controls
• Data tables and filters
• Navigation
• Notifications and system feedback
• Page layouts
• Modal interactions
• Empty, loading, success, and error states
• Responsive behavior
• Content and terminology
The design system created a common language between design and engineering. It also made it easier to improve products incrementally while keeping the broader platform experience aligned.
Instead of solving the same interface problem differently in every application, teams could begin with an established, tested pattern.
Using AI to Improve Internal Workflows
I also led the development of an AI-enabled workflow that improved the way teams created and refined content.
The solution reduced content-development time by approximately 70%, allowing teams to move more quickly while maintaining greater consistency across product, marketing, and customer-facing communications.
This work demonstrated how AI could support practical business workflows, not simply act as a standalone feature. The focus remained on solving a specific operational problem and improving the quality and speed of human work.
Collaboration and Leadership
The transformation required sustained alignment across teams with different priorities.
Executives needed a clear product vision. Engineering teams needed reusable specifications and realistic implementation paths. Product teams needed support prioritizing improvements. Customer-facing teams needed confidence that changes reflected real user needs.
I facilitated this alignment through:
• Collaborative workshops
• Journey-mapping sessions
• Prototype reviews
• Research presentations
• Design critiques
• Executive briefings
• Ongoing collaboration with engineering during implementation
I used research findings and prototypes to make decisions visible and testable. This helped move discussions away from individual preferences and toward shared customer and business outcomes.
Outcomes
The work established the foundation for a unified enterprise experience spanning 12 business systems.
Key outcomes included:
• Consolidated the experience strategy for 12 finance, accounting, HR, project management, time and expense, procurement, and payroll systems
• Created a more consistent navigation and interaction model across the product ecosystem
• Established customer research, usability testing, and Voice of the Customer practices
• Introduced reusable design patterns and system-wide interface standards
• Improved alignment among executive, product, engineering, marketing, and operations teams
• Made complex enterprise workflows easier to understand and navigate
• Created a scalable UX foundation for future features and applications
• Reduced content-development time by approximately 70% through an AI-enabled internal platform
What I Learned
This work reinforced that consolidating enterprise software is not primarily a visual-design problem. It is a systems-design and organizational-alignment problem.
A successful transformation requires understanding how people move across products, departments, and responsibilities. It also requires creating standards that teams can realistically adopt over time.
The greatest value came from connecting individual design decisions to a larger experience strategy. By combining customer research, systems thinking, reusable design patterns, and cross-functional leadership, I helped AtWork Systems move from a collection of specialized applications toward a more unified and scalable product experience.