01
A unified employee experience, powered by AI workflows
Employee Portal · Home
Good morning, Alex
Ask or search anything: benefits, PTO, IT…⌘K
Medical
3 plans
Time Off
18 days left
401(k)
6% match
Popular for you
01How do I add a dependent to my medical plan?→
02Request parental leave→
03Check my remaining PTO balance→
Portal home: personalized greeting, AI-first search, and benefit categories surfaced by role and recent activity.
The problem
No single source of truth for HR. Every question ("How do I enroll in medical?", "How much PTO do I have?") meant emailing HR, creating backlogs on both sides.
The opportunity
Build a self-service experience that feels personal and helpful, not a corporate knowledge base, so employees actually use it instead of calling HR.
Constraints
Enterprise backend dependencies · a diverse employee base · accessibility requirements · content that stays current across HR policy · earned trust around personal data.
My role
End-to-end UX for the self-service experience: research, ideation, prototyping, and usability testing with employees across departments.
02
The real cost of unclear information
Four findings from interviews across departments and tenure levels reframed the problem from "better documentation" to "faster answers."
01 · Discovery was the barrier
Employees knew the answer existed somewhere; they just couldn't find it fast. Every extra click raised the odds they'd call HR instead.
02 · Context over content
Generic HR docs weren't trusted. People wanted to know what does this mean for me?, not policy written for the whole org.
03 · First touchpoint is everything
If home didn't immediately signal "this will help you," they bounced to email or Slack. The portal had one chance on every visit.
04 · Action over information
People came to do something (enroll, file leave, check PTO), not to browse. Every surface had to feel task-oriented.
Card sorting with 15 employees: mapping how people naturally group their work needs, which surfaced the seven topic categories the IA was built around.
03
A portal that feels personal, not bureaucratic
Medical coverage
● Enrolled · PPO PlusYour plan
PPO Plus
$142/mo
Suggested for you
HDHP + HSA
$96/mo
Deductible$500 · vs $1,600
Employer contribution$0 · vs $1,200/yr
Best if youVisit often · vs rarely
Compare full plans →
Benefit detail: recommendations grounded in what the employee actually has, with a plain-language comparison.
01
Personalized home page
Home greets employees by name and surfaces what's relevant to their role, location, and recent activity, not a generic dashboard.
02
AI search as primary navigation
A prominent "ask or search anything" bar answers the specific question directly, so most people never have to navigate categories at all.
03
Proactive benefit surfacing
Instead of making employees hunt, the portal brings benefits forward around known life events: a recent parental-leave query surfaces the leave flow next time.
Design evolution
04
Validated across departments and tenure
High-fidelity prototype tested in moderated sessions with 10 ServiceNow employees; 10/10 praised the clean, organized layout and personalized navigation.
What worked
Personalization drove trust. Employees said it "felt like it knows me," and AI search cut time-to-answer by over 50% vs. category browsing.
What we iterated
The first benefit card leaned on jargon. Swapping technical names for plain language and action-oriented CTAs measurably improved comprehension in round two.
“
It actually knows what benefits I have. I didn't have to search through five pages to find the right thing.
— Employee · usability testing session
05
A measurable drop in HR burden
Self-service rate
85%
Tasks resolved without HR support, up from 52%.
Satisfaction
+50%
Increase in the quarterly HR-experience survey.
Year over year
+40%
Improvement vs. the previous portal.
Platform reach
12.5K
Employees on the redesigned portal org-wide.
Next case study
Keap Pay