Taking off to a new employee hub - Condensed

Avanade Airlines Employee Intranet Modernization

Project: Employee Portals Redesign for “Avanade Airlines”

Role: Primary UX Designer

Team: Service Design Director, Art Director, Visual Designer, Technical Leads, Project Manager, Business Analyst

Context and Challenge

• Avanade Airlines had three employee portals: Pre-Hire, Active Employees, and Alumni. Each platform provides different content based on the needs of each group (onboarding for prehires, resource and information discovery for employees, and benefit activation for alumni).

• The existing portals were outdated, inconsistent, and spread across multiple platforms.

• Employees struggled to find resources, contacts, and benefits information, creating frustration.

• The airline needed a modern intranet that could scale to over 70,000 employees.

• A previous consulting company produced custom designs that were not feasible within budget, so our team was tasked with creating a solution using as many out-of-the-box SharePoint components as possible.

My Contributions

• Created an end-to-end employee journey map that identified key tasks and challenges amongst all three employee groups.

• Conducted a Design Thinking workshop with stakeholders representing new hires, active employees, and alumni stakeholders to identify gaps in our understanding around each platform.

• Conducted a content audit on the Pre-hire and Employee portals to understand the IA of current platforms and created optimized site maps for both platforms.

• Produced UX wireframes for key pages including Home, Department, Travel, Company News, and Digital Tools.

• Collaborated with the Visual Designer to align wireframes with brand guidelines and prepare for high-fidelity design.

• Partnered with the Tech Lead to evaluate out-of-the-box versus custom components and define where customization was worth the investment.

Process Highlights

• Workshops: Facilitated collaborative sessions that validated the employee journey and helped uncover content priorities such as travel benefits and department resources.

• Information Architecture: Indexed the original portals, grouped content, and designed a simplified structure that balanced depth with ease of navigation.

• Wireframes: Established consistent patterns across page types, with broad navigation on top-level pages and content-focused layouts for deeper levels.

• Department Pages: Designed flexible templates that showed essential components while offering optional modules, giving departments a foundation without overwhelming them.

Outcome and Impact

• Delivered a clear employee journey map, optimized site architecture, and wireframes that guided the next development phase.

• Produced templates that balanced scalability through out-of-the-box SharePoint with strategic custom features.

• Received strong client feedback, and the approved designs moved forward into implementation for the airline’s 70,000 employees.

Learnings

• Developed deeper expertise in UX-specific responsibilities such as journey mapping, IA, and low-fidelity design.

• Gained confidence in client communication by facilitating workshops and presenting deliverables directly.

• Discovered that I enjoy product design work where UX strategy and practical implementation intersect