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Case Study

Corporate Directory

A global people-finding and org visibility experience designed to help employees, leaders, and admins find the right people, understand reporting relationships, and take action with less friction.

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All employee names, roles, reporting structures, screenshots, and identifying details shown here are anonymized or represented as placeholders.

People Finder
Global directory

Find people, orgs, and reporting relationships

Search by name, role, team, location, or organizational structure.

People Orgs Admin
Search “product finance”, “UX lead”, “manager”, or “org name”
All Employees Contractors Organizations Saved
Alex MorganDirector, Enterprise Product • Global Business Services
Leader
Jamie ChenSenior Manager, Finance Systems • North America
Manager
Taylor ReedUX Lead • Enterprise Platforms
UX
Jordan PatelProduct Owner • People Systems
Admin
Alex MorganDirector, Enterprise Product
TeamGlobal Business Services
LocationDetroit, MI
Reports ToVP, Enterprise Ops
ActionsEmail / Chat / Call
Org previewView full chart
VP, Enterprise Ops
Director, Enterprise Product
Finance Systems
People Platforms
My RoleLead Product Designer

Team: Product, front-end & back-end engineering, content, and 4 designers

Responsibilities: End-to-end design, stakeholder alignment, system definition, and design direction

UsersEmployees, people leaders, managers, super admins, contractors, and partners.
FocusSearch, profile views, org structure, admin workflows, and saved history.
TimelineStarted October 2023 and continued through design validation and development partnership.
The Challenge

The directory needed to do more than store names. It needed to help people understand the organization around them.

The existing experience created friction for employees trying to find colleagues, leaders trying to understand teams, and admins responsible for managing people and organizational data across disconnected systems.

What needed to change

Research revealed a disconnect between profile views and organizational views. Employees had difficulty moving between an individual profile and the broader org structure, while administrators had to manage employee and org data across separate systems and inconsistent interfaces.

  • Users had to navigate disconnected profile and org views.
  • Admins relied on multiple systems to manage employees, contractors, partners, and org structures.
  • Users had to repeat the full search journey when revisiting a person or organization.
Process Walkthrough

From basic lookup to a more connected people and organization experience.

The work focused on understanding user needs, validating flows, and designing a front-end and admin experience that could serve multiple user groups without feeling disconnected.

Uncover friction across employees, leaders, and admins.

I helped guide research into the current directory experience, focusing on where users lost context, repeated work, or had to switch systems to complete what should have been simple tasks.

  • Mapped user goals and needs across employees, people leaders, managers, and super admins.
  • Identified pain points in the existing journey, including disconnected employee and org views.
  • Documented administrative inefficiencies caused by separate systems and inconsistent interfaces.
1
Find a person or org

Users begin with a name, team, org, or partial detail.

2
Validate the result

Users need profile, role, and reporting context.

3
Understand structure

Users move between profiles and org views.

4
Take action

Users contact, revisit, or manage people and org records.

Define a unified experience for very different user needs.

The product needed to support quick employee lookup, manager visibility, and powerful admin controls without forcing users into separate, confusing experiences.

  • Created personas for new employees, existing employees, people leaders, managers, and super admins.
  • Defined core journeys for searching, revisiting, viewing org structures, and managing employee data.
  • Prioritized consistency between salaried employee, contractor, and partner experiences.
People Leader / Admin
Needs one clear path to view, manage, and act on employee and org data
  • Move easily between profile and org views.
  • Manage roles, departments, permissions, and reporting structures.
  • Revisit frequently accessed people and orgs without repeating the full journey.

Validate smarter search, saved history, and connected profile-to-org flows.

The heart of the experience became a more intuitive employee directory that helped users find the right person or org quickly, then move naturally into profile details, org charts, and contact actions.

  • Designed smart search suggestions to guide users as they type names, teams, or organizations.
  • Added saved search history so users could quickly revisit frequent people and orgs.
  • Created clean profile sections with direct paths to email, chat, phone, and org chart context.

Partner with IT to carry design intent into development.

After validation, I supported detailed design handoff through high-fidelity Figma prototypes and ongoing collaboration with the IT team to ensure the delivered experience matched the UX and UI intent.

  • Created high-fidelity prototypes with detailed annotations for interactive behavior.
  • Aligned the admin dashboard and profile-level management flows into a consistent experience.
  • Partnered with IT through implementation to maintain design quality and usability.
Key Decisions

Design choices that turned a directory into a connected enterprise tool.

1

Connected profile and org views

Users could move between an individual profile and broader org context without losing their place.

2

Introduced smarter search

Suggestions and contextual results helped users find employees, orgs, and relevant records faster.

3

Added saved history

Frequently visited people and organizations became easier to revisit without repeating the entire journey.

4

Unified admin workflows

Admins could manage roles, departments, permissions, and reporting structures from a more consistent interface.

Outcome

A clearer, more seamless directory experience for employees, managers, and admins.

The project received positive feedback during design validation, especially around simplified search, mobile-friendly access, and the ability to move more naturally between employee details and organizational context.

✓

Faster discovery

Smart search and filters helped users find the right person or org more quickly.

✓

Less repeated effort

Saved history made it easier to revisit frequently accessed people and organizations.

✓

Cleaner admin experience

Managers and admins gained a more intuitive path to manage employee, contractor, partner, and org data.

✓

Stronger collaboration

Employees could more easily find contact details and connect across departments and locations.

People Finder reframed the corporate directory as a connected system for finding, understanding, and managing people across the enterprise.

By integrating search, profile details, org structure, saved history, and admin workflows, the experience reduced friction for employees while giving leaders and admins a clearer way to manage organizational information.