Visa Global Employee Intranet
Transforming the daily digital experience for 20,000 employees worldwide
Key Outcomes
- Won first place in the Intranet Design Awards (Design category) with honorable mentions in Usability
- Transformed the employee experience for 20,000 employees, addressing frustration reported by nearly half the workforce
- Evolved from a mobile companion app into a full responsive intranet redesign
- Produced a 450-page annotation guide, wireframes for all breakpoints, and interaction models for development handoff
- Championed employee-first, research-driven decision-making over stakeholder-driven feature requests
CONTEXT
The Challenge
Visa is a global financial services corporation with nearly 20,000 employees worldwide. Research revealed that nearly half of its workforce felt frustrated or ineffective on the job. They needed an employee-first intranet that would fundamentally transform the daily experience, reducing frustration, increasing productivity, and creating a cultural hub for the organization.
What began as a mobile companion app quickly grew into a full responsive redesign of the entire Visa intranet.
The Problem
Nearly half of Visa's 20,000 employees reported feeling frustrated or ineffective on the job. The existing intranet was a contributing factor.
STRATEGY & APPROACH
Employee First, Mobile First
Our mobile-first approach forced us to prioritize ruthlessly, creating a hyper-contextual, personalized experience and cutting unnecessary content to focus on what employees actually needed.
Through extensive user research, we identified the key tasks employees relied on their intranet for and translated these into purpose-built mobile tools: shuttle schedule, cafe menu, holiday calendar, employee search, and a system for discovering and interacting with nearby colleagues.
App Wireframes — Key Flows
KEY DECISIONS & TRADEOFFS
Creative Solutioning
Visa challenged us not just to create something useful, but to delight employees enough to compete with other Silicon Valley employers. We pushed ourselves to challenge typical patterns and explore unconventional interactions while maintaining an extremely intuitive experience.
Responsive Web Experience
The responsive intranet redesign ran on a parallel track with the app. We carried our learnings forward, making deliberate decisions about how experiences would scale from native mobile to large-screen contexts.
We spoke continually with employees to understand priorities, using findings to shape content hierarchy and feature prioritization. At every turn, we pushed the client to test early, test often, and make decisions based on employee needs rather than stakeholder assumptions.
Wireframes — Location, Employee Groups & News
Documentation & Handoff
I worked closely with the off-site development team to ensure every interaction functioned as intended. The handoff included a 450-page annotation guide, wireframes for all breakpoints, and detailed interaction models for key experiences.
Recognition
First place in the Intranet Design Awards (Design category), with honorable mentions in Usability. A digital home that reduced daily friction for 20,000 employees.
IMPACT & OUTCOMES
Award-Winning Results
The redesigned Visa intranet unified tools, news, social connections, work portals, and alerts into one seamless and delightful experience. The work was recognized with first place in the Design category of the Intranet Awards, with honorable mentions in Intranet Usability. More importantly, it gave 20,000 employees a digital home that reduced daily friction and fostered genuine connection.
