Making PlayStation’s Employee Experiences Easier to Navigate
Nexus had a new home on ServiceNow, but there was more work to do to make it useful and welcoming for employees. Leading two designers, I helped shape a research and design roadmap around clearer information architecture and reusable page templates. The response to the designs led to a second assignment: a pre-hire portal for people preparing to join PlayStation.
PlayStation
Design lead, strategy, and hands-on design guidance
Two designers, led by me
ServiceNow Employee Center
Employees using Nexus; incoming employees using the pre-hire portal
Scope
Intranet audit and redesign strategy, employee survey and synthesis, information architecture, primary page templates, and pre-hire portal design guidance
Part 1 — Giving Nexus a clearer direction
Looking beyond a visual refresh
Nexus, PlayStation’s internal intranet, had recently moved into a new space built around ServiceNow’s Employee Center framework. The request was to bring a UX perspective to the experience after release: audit what was there, identify opportunities, and provide design solutions to revitalize it.
The work reached beyond appearance. Nexus contained an extensive information base, and its custom implementation resembled ServiceNow without making full use of the platform’s templates. Improving the experience meant considering how employees found information, how pages were organized, and how the design could work with the underlying framework.
I led two designers in developing a strategy and process roadmap. That gave the project a sequence: understand employee needs, synthesize the findings, simplify the information structure, and establish the primary page templates the company needed.
Starting with employees and information architecture
The approach combined an audit of the existing experience with an employee survey and synthesis. The aim was to ground the redesign in how people used Nexus and what they needed from it, then use that understanding to guide the structure of the site.
Information architecture came first. Before refining individual pages, the team needed to work through the extensive information base and how it should be organized. This gave the page designs a shared structure to build on and kept the work connected to the larger employee experience.
My earlier work on design-department onboarding was useful context here. It had involved organizing information so that people could understand the company, its teams, and how to work within them. Nexus was a separate project for a broader audience, with its own platform and information architecture challenges.
Proof of Concept for v2 intranet experience.
Returning the design to the platform’s templates
A central direction was to bring the build back toward ServiceNow’s Employee Center templates. The existing custom approach looked like ServiceNow, but the goal was to design more directly within the framework’s supported patterns.
That decision shaped the scope of the design work. We committed to a minimum set of primary page templates suited to the company’s purposes. Those templates would establish a common starting point for the experience and help the team move forward with a defined set of design priorities.
The roadmap connected the broader IA work to this practical delivery scope. It gave the team a way to progress from the structure of Nexus into page designs that could support the company’s needs within ServiceNow.
Part 2 — Extending the work to people joining PlayStation
A second assignment grew from the Nexus designs
The response to the Nexus designs was positive, and the team was asked to take on a pre-hire portal. This expanded the work to people preparing to join PlayStation, with a different relationship to the company and its internal information.
The portal extended the collaboration while introducing a new audience. It needed clear communication, a consistent visual identity, and design guidance that could be carried into implementation. My role combined direction with detailed support for the designer and the graphic-design and content partner.
Making the design easier to build
The portal reviews covered visual design, interaction behavior, and content specifications. I coached the designer to separate those annotations into distinct specification tabs, making each type of guidance easier to find. We also addressed a disabled-state standard so behavior was documented alongside appearance and copy.
Visual reviews identified specific differences to resolve: a purple gradient that did not fit the brand, required header and footer elements, corner-radius differences between the design and platform defaults, and mismatched color tokens.
These reviews connected the intended experience to the details needed for implementation. Each observation gave the team a concrete decision to work through and a clearer reference for building the page consistently.
Choosing where to spend time on polish
A confetti micro-animation offered a small moment of welcome, but refining its timing required additional effort. I discussed starting with a simpler version and returning to the finer adjustments later.
The decision was about sequencing the work: giving the team a practical way to move forward while leaving room for refinement. It also made the discussion about polish specific enough to weigh against the rest of the portal work.
Giving feedback a familiar format
For the satisfaction widget, I recommended the five-point customer-satisfaction scale already used in PlayStation experiences. Sharing actual product screens gave the team a concrete reference for the pattern and how to present it.
The recommendation brought an established feedback format into the portal. It gave the team a consistent way to ask about the experience as the design developed.
What the work established
The Nexus engagement established a strategy and process roadmap, with information architecture leading into a defined set of primary page templates. The positive response to the designs led to the pre-hire portal assignment, where the work continued through specification guidance, visual consistency reviews, motion decisions, and a satisfaction-feedback recommendation.
Across both phases, the contribution combined design leadership with close attention to the product. Leading the team meant setting a direction, defining a workable scope, and staying involved in the decisions that connected the experience to the platform.
The two phases belong together because one grew from the other: a clearer direction for an employee intranet opened the door to improving the experience for people about to join the company.