Akumina
Redesigned an intranet Content Management System based on user research, prototype testing, and competitive research.
I was hired to run a UX audit of an Employee Experience Platform, essentially a CMS for company intranets. What started as a simple audit became a multi-year engagement of user research, product design, and building a UI system.
I interviewed customer teams of content authors, intranet managers, and IT admins to find pain points and opportunities, then wireframed, prototyped, and ran live user tests to iterate toward a data-driven, modern experience.
The platform had been heavily engineering- and sales-driven, to the point that it was difficult to understand and use, and packed with edge-case features that cluttered a bloated interface.
- Interviewed stakeholders from every internal team plus 15+ customer teams to identify pain points, gaps, and growth areas
- Created wireflows to map the ideal user journey
- Designed 150+ screens and interactive prototypes to test, validate, and iterate with users
- Ran hundreds of hours of competitive research across dozens of CMS platforms
- Worked with product management, engineering, and client success throughout
The project became the biggest transformation of the product in ten years. It was well received by clients and noted positively by Gartner and Clearbox.
Areas I redesigned or built from scratch included the page-building canvas experience, backend content management and structured content, multi-lingual management, content lifecycle and editorial review workflows, digital asset management, multi-channel mass communication, persona-based content variations, federated and AI-assisted search, generative AI, and the out-of-the-box intranet page templates.
Alongside product work, I designed intranets for Akumina's clients through the Client Services team and direct engagements, drawing on deep platform knowledge and intranet best practices. I've built 9 intranets for over 120,000 employees, though many are under NDA.