The initial goal was direct: understand why a visually refined landing page failed to convert during high-stakes holiday moments.

Usability testing revealed that users were not lost; they were unconvinced. Under time pressure and emotional load, behaviour changed markedly. Users became more risk-averse, scanned less, and relied on quick heuristics.

These hesitation points reappeared across successive holiday seasons, particularly around uncertainty about product suitability, shipping timing, and gift appropriateness.

Quantitative data confirmed limited engagement beyond the first scroll. Qualitative sessions explained why: unmet expectations and delayed reassurance.

With baseline issues identified, the focus shifted from diagnosis to intentional redesign.

One design direction was deliberately deprioritised: a visually dominant, hero-first layout that pushed explanatory content further down the page. Testing showed that users needed clearer value framing and decision aids earlier, not more visual emphasis.

Using behavioural principles, the journey was reshaped to reduce cognitive load, strengthen salience, and align content order with how decisions are made under pressure.

The landing page evolved from a static presentation into a sequence of deliberate decision moments, separating inspiration from commerce, elevating the Gift Finder, clarifying support pathways, and rewriting copy for rapid scanning.

A small change produced a disproportionate effect: introducing concise, high-salience value statements such as warranty, gifting suitability, and delivery certainty directly above the product grid. This reduced early-journey hesitation and restored confidence.

This project was not about redesigning a landing page. It was about learning how people decide when attention is fragmented and stakes are high.

Clarity, in these moments, is not aesthetic. It is functional.

The Company was undergoing a major transformation: a move from a monolithic commerce platform to a composable, headless architecture; the launch of new digital platforms; and an ambition to increase eCommerce performance globally.

At the same time, accessibility requirements were rising, internal ownership was fragmenting, and teams were under pressure to deliver quickly.

The core challenge was not change itself, but how to make high-impact decisions during change without relying on assumptions, internal opinion, or partial metrics.

I led a research-led transformation focused on turning fragmented signals into shared evidence, structured around four pillars.

Continuous Discovery

I embedded mixed-method research across web properties to surface behavioural friction early and create a steady flow of decision-ready insight.

Across platforms and over time, one pattern remained consistent: persistent friction around navigation clarity and content hierarchy. Users repeatedly struggled to understand where they were in the journey and how to progress, particularly in product exploration and service flows.

These observations reinforced that the issue was not visual design, but semantic precision and hierarchy.

Cross-functional Enablement

I worked closely with eCommerce, Development, and Marketing to translate research findings into prioritisation inputs, ensuring insights informed roadmap, content, and feature decisions.

Operationalising Accessibility

I acted as a point of escalation for digital accessibility, embedding WCAG requirements into delivery processes so compliance became a design and development concern rather than a late audit.

Platform-First Thinking

During the SAP Commerce Cloud migration, I supported the evolution of the design system to meet new development constraints, enabling consistency across Community Online, B2B, and brand platforms while preserving flexibility.

This work helped reposition UX research as a stabilising force during transformation.

Decisions became more evidence-led, accessibility risks were surfaced earlier, and platform changes were supported by a shared understanding of user behaviour.

We shifted from release-driven decision-making to evidence-informed prioritisation, using research as a standard checkpoint rather than an optional add-on.

The accessibility challenge was structural, not symptomatic.

Legacy SAP Commerce Cloud pages coexisted with new headless components, creating inconsistent patterns and uneven accessibility quality. The design system lacked WCAG-aligned guidance and governance, and responsibility for accessibility was unclear across design, development, content, and QA.

Teams shipped quickly. Reviews happened late, accessibility debt accumulated, and fixes became increasingly costly.

The core challenge was not identifying accessibility issues, but building the structures, processes, and shared understanding required to prevent them.

The accessibility program was built on four parallel pillars designed to embed accessibility into everyday decisions rather than post-release correction.

Accessibility Governance and Foundations

I authored and introduced an accessibility roadmap aligned with WCAG 2.2 AA and tailored to the Company’s platforms and component libraries. It defined responsibility boundaries, acceptance criteria, mandatory checkpoints, and escalation paths.

Embedding Accessibility in the Design System

Working with design and engineering leads, I integrated accessibility requirements directly into component specifications, including semantic structure, contrast constraints, keyboard behaviour, error handling, and inclusive copy guidance.

Continuous Audits and Behavioural Validation

I established an audit program combining automated scanning, manual WCAG reviews, and user-centred observation using screen reader workflows.

Cross-Functional Enablement

I supported teams with training and lightweight tooling, including accessibility office hours, pattern libraries with dos and don’ts, sprint-level checklists, and pre-release smoke tests.

The accessibility program reshaped how the organisation approached digital quality.

Strategic Impact

Accessibility became part of the standard definition of done. Platform migrations launched with stronger foundations, fewer regressions, and a reduced backlog of accessibility debt.

User Impact

Screen reader journeys became more predictable. Form-heavy flows such as checkout, account creation, and repairs showed reduced friction and clearer progression.

Organisational Impact

Design system teams adopted accessibility-first component governance. Development teams integrated checks into CI/CD workflows. Content and marketing teams embedded inclusive writing practices as standard.

The clearest signal of change was the integration of accessibility criteria directly into the design system’s component acceptance process: no new component or update could ship without meeting accessibility requirements.

Accessibility moved from specialist review to shared expectation.

Several services relied on fragmented booking and operational flows. The online booking process for left luggage and storage, in particular, required unnecessary steps and fields, increasing interaction cost at moments when travellers were already under stress.

In parallel, new services such as remote baggage check-in, confiscated item return, and excess baggage handling introduced additional complexity across channels.

The core challenge was to reduce interaction cost for customers while maintaining operational clarity for staff across locations.

Optimising the Booking Journey

The left luggage and storage booking flow was streamlined to reduce unnecessary steps and form fields, with a clear focus on speed, clarity, and predictability.

Key improvements included:

– Clearer progression through booking steps

– Reduced cognitive load during data entry

– Early visibility of pricing and storage duration

– Support for post-booking actions such as charge tracking and retrieval reminders

The goal was not only to improve usability, but to lower interaction cost at scale across multiple locations.

Service Blueprinting for Omnichannel Alignment

To support consistency across digital and physical touchpoints, I created service blueprints mapping frontstage user interactions, backstage staff actions, and supporting systems and dependencies.

In a security-constrained, time-critical environment like airports, service blueprints were essential to align customer-facing flows with staffing, logistics, and physical space constraints that could not be resolved at interface level alone.

This work exposed misalignments between customer expectations and operational reality, helping teams coordinate changes across departments rather than solving issues in isolation.

Solutions were typically piloted in a limited number of locations, validated against real operational constraints, and only then scaled across airports and stations.

The challenge was not technical delivery, but participation design.

Talawa needed a platform that enabled artists to be visible and discoverable without self-promotion fatigue, supported meaningful interaction without being dominated by a small minority of users, reflected professional theatre norms, and balanced openness with moderation, safeguarding, and governance.

Research and stakeholder discussions made one risk explicit: participation inequality would undermine the platform’s purpose.

The problem to solve was therefore clear: how do you design a professional community where contribution feels safe, lightweight, and worthwhile, especially for early-career artists?

The UX strategy focused on lowering the cost of participation while preserving professional standards.

Designing for Participation, Not Posting

Rather than encouraging users to create content, the platform was designed so that participation emerged as a side effect of other actions such as applying, attending, bookmarking, editing, tagging, or responding.

Profiles, events, and opportunities did most of the expressive work. This approach was directly informed by research on online community dynamics and aimed to prevent early drop-off or silent disengagement.

Audience-Aware Access and Permissions

Registration defined three distinct user types:

– Artists

– Industry

– Casual visitors

This distinction ensured that artists retained control over visibility and contact, industry participation supported opportunity flow without dominance, and unregistered users could explore value before committing.

Taxonomy Before Interface

A significant portion of the work focused on taxonomy and data structure, not screens.

Skills, disciplines, interests, career stages, and motivations were defined early, enabling meaningful filtering and discovery, region-aware mapping, and personalised surfacing of opportunities and events.

The platform was built on Drupal, selected for its flexibility in permissions, content types, and moderation workflows.

To support parallel development, I recommended a structured deployment pipeline using Jenkins and GitHub, allowing:

– Features to be tested in isolation

– UX sign-off before release

– Reduced regression during iteration

This was particularly important given offshore development teams and a phased launch plan.

Talawa Make Online launched as a professional infrastructure, not a social experiment.

The platform:

– Enabled artists to present themselves credibly and consistently

– Supported discovery of opportunities, events, and peers across regions

– Reduced reliance on informal networks and insider knowledge

– Gave Talawa visibility into engagement patterns without compromising trust

By prioritising structure, permissions, and taxonomy, the platform avoided common failure modes of creative communities: noise, inequality, and disengagement.

The existing website struggled to support OMS’s mission at scale.

Key issues included fragmented content structures, a lack of a cohesive design system, low conversion through digital donations, and high dependency on administrators for content updates.

More fundamentally, the platform did not sufficiently reflect the real-life constraints of people living with MS, including fatigue, variable attention, and the need to revisit information over time.

The core challenge was to design a platform that balanced clarity, credibility, and compassion, while supporting both educational goals and organisational sustainability.

To move beyond assumptions, the discovery phase centred on a diary study, allowing participants to document aspects of their daily lives over several days.

This method surfaced:

– Fluctuating energy levels and attention across the day

– Non-linear information needs, with frequent revisiting of the same content

– Emotional sensitivity around health-related decisions

– Reliance on mobile devices for short, fragmented sessions

The diary study provided insight into how and when people engaged with information, not just what they sought.

Supporting methods included internal interviews with OMS staff, reviews of OMS materials, and focus groups validating early findings and testing assumptions about key tasks.

Focus group feedback highlighted friction in sign-up and account creation, “My account” areas and saved content, and understanding how to progress through OMS resources over time.

The UX strategy focused on reducing cognitive load while increasing trust and continuity.

Structuring for Clarity and Return Visits

Information architecture was redesigned to group content into predictable, clearly labelled templates, support scanning and short sessions without losing context, and allow users to save and return to content over time.

User profiles enabled favourites and personalised access, reflecting the need to engage gradually rather than all at once.

Designing for Mobile-First Reality

Given diary-study insights, mobile experience became a priority. Optimisation work contributed to a reported 30% increase in mobile traffic, reflecting improved accessibility and usability rather than acquisition-driven growth.

Supporting Behaviour Over Time

Rather than relying on one-off interactions, the platform introduced lifecycle emails triggered at meaningful moments in the user journey. These were designed to reinforce motivation, encourage return visits, and support sustained engagement without pressure.

Donation flows were redesigned to reduce friction and increase clarity.

Key improvements included:

– Clear, visible donation entry points

– Support for recurring donations

– Options to dedicate donations in honour or memory

– Clear explanations of how funds are used

– Use of testimonials and third-party endorsements to reinforce credibility

These changes aligned fundraising with OMS’s educational mission, avoiding pressure while supporting sustainability.

The redesigned platform strengthened OMS’s ability to deliver on its mission digitally.

User Impact

– Clearer access to information and resources

– Improved mobile usability for fragmented sessions

– Better support for revisiting and saving content

Organisational Impact

– Greater editorial autonomy for OMS staff

– More consistent experience through design system adoption

– Improved alignment between content, community, and fundraising goals

The platform evolved from an information repository into a supportive digital environment shaped around real user behaviour.

UX initiatives were evaluated in isolation.

Checkout changes affected a small proportion of users but carried high intent. Product page listing and navigation changes reached more users but produced subtler behavioural shifts. Template updates varied by market and maturity.

Without a shared framework, UX prioritisation stalled across initiatives and discussions defaulted to subjective judgement rather than evidence.

The core challenge was comparability and credibility, not measurement volume.

The strategy was to design a single, reusable ROI framework that could be applied consistently to any UX change, regardless of journey depth or market size.

The framework needed to:

Core Requirements

– Connect behavioural metrics to business impact

– Normalise performance across different exposure levels

– Support forecasting before launch and accountability after release

– Prevent inflated ROI claims in deep-funnel contexts

– Produce clear, trusted ROI tiers for decision-making

Scalability was a deliberate design goal, not an afterthought.

The framework was first validated through a checkout optimisation initiative, then adopted as the standard evaluation model for UX changes.

Key outcomes included:

– A shared, auditable ROI language across teams

– Increased trust in UX impact reporting

– Faster, evidence-based prioritisation decisions

– More disciplined allocation of engineering effort

Importantly, the framework was also used to deprioritise initiatives with limited exposure and low strategic leverage. It proved capable of constraining investment, not just justifying it.

UX shifted from a cost discussion to a decision-support function.