Fortune 500 Finance Company

Skills: Sketch, Wire framing, Using components

Role: UI Designer

Duration: 2 Days

This project was for my Career Foundry mentor who is a contractor with a Fortune 500 Company within FinTech.   She was hired to help with the UX of their new internal site for new hires.  Due to a high turnaround rate on the project, she needed the extra help with the visual UI aspect and asked me and another CF Alumni to create high fidelity screens using the company’s existing brand guidelines.

The Background: The stakeholder’s needs of creating an internal website arose during the beginning stages of the pandemic.  As states were shutting down, employers needed to find ways to get their employees to work from home. The purpose of the internal website is to welcome new hires, get their paperwork submitted, and provide Human Resources remotely.

The Challenge: The current live version of the internal website isn’t user-centered at all. Though it is functional, the layout and flow of the site is confusing to users and potentially discourages new hires who are just embarking on their journey with the company due to the lack of accessibility and difficulties of navigation when onboarding.

The Solution: Our goal was to rework some of the existing pages so that the visuals were cohesive with the external site, solidifying new employee’s onboarding experience with the company.

I first looked at the current home page of the company’s external site and compared it to the style guide that was given to us from the previous head of UX. I was able to determine the reusable components I could use for the internal website to give it a familiar look and feel.

After reading the above line “Additional resources are located…”, I decided that those additional resources would be important to include on the home page, and mocked up some wireframes according to what we had in the style guide.

Some challenge along the way: The symbols and patterns given to us in the UI kit were not properly built, giving us a hard time when trying to scale or expand some of them.  In addition, the kit lacked visual finesse.  Components such as cards and buttons did not have proper padding and caused our designs to look stale and unfinished. In order to overcome this, we took it upon ourselves to redo some of the kit elements so that they looked refreshed, but still related to the external site.

End Results: The visual aspect of the project really shines through in the before and after. The challenge that still remains is that the user experience was only impacted on a visceral level. If we had more time and support from stakeholders, I would focus more on the content we were given, especially wording, to ensure that the experience was more understandable to the new hires.