Aligning navigation, reuse, & process across a 70-team enterprise platform

Principal→ Director of UX, Fidelity Investments | 2022–2025
Information architecture, design systems, governance, cross-team alignment

UI examples have been modified for confidentiality.

NetBenefits is a multi-product platform with four product verticals, each with its own roadmap, design decisions, and legacy patterns. But users don’t experience it that way—they move fluidly across retirement, health, and brokerage products in the same session.

As teams optimized locally, navigation and layouts diverged. Workarounds piled up. Tasks became harder for users to complete, and support costs increased.

The root issue wasn’t visual polish—it was structural drift.

The opportunity was to re-establish shared structure—clear navigation models, predictable templates, and repeatable patterns. Enabling 70+ teams to ship faster, reduce custom builds, and give users a more coherent experience across products.

Analysis

To ground the work, I led an assessment with design and engineering leads from four major product verticals. We mapped navigation patterns, layout behaviors, accessibility gaps, and design-system adoption challenges.

Three themes surfaced:

  • Inconsistent IA: Different teams solved the same navigation problems in different ways.

  • Layout variance: Content and actions appeared in unpredictable places, making pages hard to scan and harder to maintain.

  • Implementation friction: Without shared patterns, developers spent time recreating existing solutions or working around mismatched designs.

The audit created alignment around a central reality: the platform needed structural coherence, not one more pattern or component.

Three teams built similar but not identical flows, making the experience feel familiar but never truly consistent.

Solutions

The goal was to design a system that could scale across complex products, diverse teams, and varied tech stacks—without requiring heavy governance or rewrites.

Core templates

We defined four page templates that became the backbone of the platform:

  • Hub Level 1: Centralized entry point for accounts, information, and key shortcuts

  • Hub Level 2: Single-account page with consistent content and action zones

  • Spoke: Details on a specific feature or service for an account

  • Task: Guided, step-based transactional flows (withdrawals, updates, etc.)

These templates clarified where content lived, how users moved between pages, and what actions were available at each layer.

Page templates established consistent rhythm and predictable navigation for users, as well as scalable patterns for teams.

Navigational Model

We introduced a hub-and-spoke navigation system for web that had stronger parity with mobile app and mirrored actual user behavior:

  • Clear “Go to [Section]” destination labels

  • Predictable entry/exit logic

  • Fewer redundant pathways (reduced cognitive load)

  • Consistent patterns across devices

This eliminated tertiary tab sets, overlapping nav bars, and inconsistent return paths.

Consolidated IA cut redundant entry points, clarified page-to-page hierarchy, and aligned with mobile app navigation.

Reusable Patterns

Once the architecture was stable, we defined UI-level patterns designed to be flexible across tech stacks. Those include:

  • Page-level layouts to establish information hierarchy

  • Content zones for quick actions, summaries, and sub-sections

  • Button hierarchy with standardized order, states, and responsive behavior

These patterns anchored daily design work to the templates and navigation model.

UI examples of button groups showing secondary, primary, and tertiary button arrangements in different placements. On the right, two mockups show these button patterns inside a dialog and a form

Shared patterns like button group brought consistency & accessibility to web and mobile

The prototype below shows a hub-to-task flow with the button group pattern, demonstrating order/hierarchy and responsive behavior across desktop and mobile.

Partnerships

I served as a connective layer between product teams and the enterprise design system—helping teams apply templates, resolve design blockers, and scope patterns for real-world constraints.

What this looked like in practice:

  • Weekly office hours to troubleshoot navigation, layout, and UI components

  • Building flexible interaction patterns with designers and developers

  • Cross-team facilitation to align vertical-specific edge cases with the shared model

  • System coaching: helping teams interpret templates for complex products and legacy code

My role wasn’t to “police” the system—it was to help teams succeed within it.

Governance

To sustain adoption, I joined pre-release product reviews.

I worked with governance partners to define:

  • Checklists for page structure and template alignment

  • Recommended review workflows

  • Cross-functional checkpoints between design, accessibility, and engineering

These lightweight processes reduced last-minute escalations and helped teams engage earlier, when feedback was most useful.

Outcomes

  • Accelerated delivery across 70+ product teams through reusable templates and governance workflows adopted by additional business units

  • Reduced duplication and support requests due to clearer documentation and fewer one-off patterns

  • Consistent user journeys across product verticals, leading to fewer navigation-related complaints in product reviews and customer-service calls, with increased positive sentiment across product journeys

  • Enterprise award recognition for measurable impact on cross-product consistency

VP-UX Chapter Lead, Fidelity Investments

“Moira's leadership, generosity, and design excellence made a lasting impact on me and so many others at Fidelity! Thank you for always showing up with clarity, care, and initiative. I’m excited to see her thrive and continue raising the bar for UX.”

Senior UX Designer, Fidelity Investments

“Moira is a design force of nature and a pleasure to work with. She brought many of us together for the first time to make our work more collaborative, efficient, and rooted in best practice.”

What I’d do differently

In future implementations, I would:

  • Accelerate stakeholder alignment by running earlier cross-vertical IA mapping sessions

  • Involve engineering sooner in defining edge-case states and responsive behavior

  • Formalize a “starter kit” earlier—giving teams examples of how to apply templates to complex, multi-product experiences

These refinements would help teams adopt the system even faster.

Next

Patient Portal