Approach

Before shaping any new structure, I mapped the existing site architecture, charting how content was currently organized and how sections related to each other.

The exercise made clear where the gaps were: content had accumulated without a defined hierarchy, and relationships between sections were either absent or implied. The Explore page functioned as a general repository for all the topics, combining multiple content without clear categorization.

I worked with an initial sitemap direction handed after business exploratory sessions, along with insights from client conversations about their current state, challenges and their community feedback notes.

I focused on taking a directional proposal and turning it into a structure that could actually hold the organization's content, serve its different audiences, and scale as they grew. Focusing on providing an experience that felt complete and intentional throughout the entire site, with enough connections to offer discoverable paths for every audience:

• Separate content into distinct domains (Research and Community)
• Introduce structure into libraries to group related content
• Define clearer relationships between sections
• Match the organization's community needs and preferences to consume content

Solution

The first part was all about structure.

Reorganizing the architecture so every important area could have a defined space: Organization's story, donors information, grant committee, shared missions organizations.

The architecture was reorganized into two primary content domains that support both research visibility and community engagement:

• Research: formal outputs such as papers, research library, grants, and scientific content
• Community: engagement through news, events, collaborations, donations and storytelling content

The new architecture would allow users to follow clearer paths based on their intent, while supporting the organization to offer both formal research exploration and community engagement in a more structured and scalable way.

Next, the inner layers: every main area has its own content library with filtering options to select categories and content type, which allows it to group related information while supporting content accessibility.

Added flexibility made the content more approachable. By grouping categories into clear structures and giving accessible formats a real home in the system as filters, the platform could help community members understand research findings without ever simplifying the science itself, keeping things rigorous for a scientific audience then made reachable for everyone else, bridging the two without compromising either.

At the same time, Community content was buzzed as it came up on Newsletters, social media and messaging platforms, but was given structure and findability as a News & Events library that served as the single source that offered the depth of the scope for the Organization activities and accomplishments.

The structure of the site also worked to keep research and community connected rather than separate. Reusable content sections link users from a piece of research to the community activity around it ( the events, the updates, the conversation) so the experience holds together as people move between learning, participating, and contributing.

Outcome

The redesign gave the organization a structure that could finally hold both sides of what it does: research and community. Two distinct domains of content, with many ways to move between them. Content that had been scattered across newsletters, social feeds, and messaging now had defined places to live, and the paths I shaped let people cross freely between them: from a research paper to the event around it, from a piece of community news back to the science behind it. Two domains, many ways to engage.

The structure shipped. The interconnectivity proposal got deferred for a possible later improvement. It passed client review, went through real validation before release, and is on production now, with public release weeks away. What comes next is the part only real use can answer.

I'd want to know whether the many paths actually get used, or whether people settle into one familiar route and the rest go unwalked.

Now that all that scattered content lives in one place, I'd want to know if seeing the full scope finally makes the organization legible, or if it lands as too much at once.

And the question under all of it: now that the whole picture is visible, does it change how people understand the organization itself (how deep its support for research runs, how wide its community reaches, how fully it lives its purpose?) And if it does, that clarity might do more than help people navigate. It might bring new people in.

Approach

Before opening any frames, I worked across Confluence and the existing Figma files, mapping approved requirements against current flows and the design system already in progress to build a clear picture of what existed, what was missing, and where the experience could be improved.

I focused on three areas where I saw the most opportunity:

• Visibility: Making member status effortlessly visible, rather than requiring navigation to find it.
• Contextual relevance: Surfacing actions based on a member's current lifecycle state, so administrators would only see what was actually available to them at that moment.
• Role clarity: Identifying where the experience needed to differentiate between member types while taking every opportunity to reduce noise without losing necessary functionality.

From there, every proposal followed the same logic: the right information and the right options, at the right moment.

Solution

Statuses were already part of individual profiles, expressed through an existing color system. Carrying that same indicator into the directory cards could feel as a natural extension: administrators could scan membership status across the entire office at a glance, without opening individual profiles. Consistent, low-effort, and already within the established design language.

As member lifecycle requirements came in, the profile needed to support an expanding set of actions: activating, terminating, rehiring, updating credentials. Each one was proposed and integrated with the same principle in mind: options should reflect the member's current state available actions, not sit as permanent fixtures regardless of context. When termination was in scope, a rehire action was built alongside it, when password update feature was introduced, it was positioned within its own range of action on an active account. The result was a profile that stayed readable and purposeful as its functionality grew.

When termination information needed a home in the profile, the initial direction was to add it as a new tab under the Additional Info card at the bottom. That placement would have made it easy to miss, but since an administrator opening a terminated member's profile needs that context immediately, not after scrolling past the rest of the layout, I proposed to surface it as a distinct block at the top of the profile, styled to signal a special member state and its most relevant information. The approach met some technical resistance, as loading that block added a brief jump in the page load compared to standard profile, but the case for visibility as priority held.

The same logic extended across the system, where agent and staff profiles were adapted to reflect their different requirements, keeping each view purposeful without fragmenting the overall experience.

Outcome

The project wrapped with a member management experience that held together across lifecycle stages, role types, and an expanding set of actions. Built incrementally over several months while maintaining a consistent internal logic. Every decision pointed in the same direction: clarity and access.

The product was heading to launch at the close of this project. The real questions that are worth asking: whether the clarity translated to actual efficiency, where administrators still encountered friction, and even further, what the status indicators meant in practice at scale.