Making a New-Hire Portal Easier to Specify and Evaluate
A new-hire portal took shape through focused collaboration with another team. I helped its designer and content partner work through specifications, visual consistency, motion, and satisfaction feedback—making design decisions clearer while keeping product ownership with their team.
PlayStation · Consulting design mentor · Employee portal built on ServiceNow · Review discussions in January and March 2026
The details crossed several disciplines
The team was developing a portal for incoming employees. It needed to communicate clearly while working within an existing platform and the company’s visual identity.
I contributed as a design consultant and mentor to the designer and the graphic-design/content partner. The questions we worked through ranged from the structure of the specification to the way an animation should be delivered. They were different aspects of the same practical issue: making an experience that the team could explain, build, and evaluate consistently.
Separating the specification into useful parts
I coached the designer to separate visual, interaction, and content annotations into distinct specification tabs. The review also covered a disabled-state standard, making behavior part of the specification alongside appearance and copy. That gave engineers clearer information to work from than a screen image alone.
The visual review included concrete discrepancies: a purple gradient that did not fit the brand, required header and footer elements, corner-radius differences between the intended design and the platform default, and mismatched color tokens.
These details mattered because an implementation could resemble the mock while still using inconsistent rules. Calling out the differences made the review actionable and gave the team more precise questions to resolve.
Making a deliberate tradeoff on motion
The portal included a confetti micro-animation. Fine-tuning its timing could improve the result, but it also took more time.
I discussed a simpler initial version with a later refinement. That approach treated the animation as a decision about quality and effort, rather than assume every visual detail needed to reach its final state before the team could proceed.
My contribution was the tradeoff and guidance. The available record does not establish that the team shipped a particular animation version or quantify any time saved.
Choosing a more consistent satisfaction measure
For the satisfaction widget, I recommended the five-point customer-satisfaction scale already used in PlayStation experiences, rather than a smiley or star treatment. I shared the actual product screens as a reference.
This made the recommendation concrete. The team could examine an existing pattern and the way it framed a response, rather than interpret a generic instruction to add feedback.
The widget gave the experience a way to collect satisfaction feedback using a familiar scale. My contribution was the choice of pattern and a concrete reference for implementing it.
A consulting contribution with clear boundaries
The work produced specific guidance on specification structure, visual standards, motion scope, and feedback design. Another team remained responsible for the portal and its delivery; I supported its designers through those decisions rather than lead the launch.
This case demonstrates the kind of contribution I can make outside my own reporting line: identify the exact decision, provide a useful reference, and help a designer work through the implications. It is separate from the design-onboarding system I authored for new designers.