Context
emagine is one of Europe’s largest IT consultancy firms, placing thousands of specialists with enterprise clients. The existing consultant portal had accumulated years of feature debt and was generating significant support volume from users unable to navigate core workflows.
Challenge
The portal handled legally and financially sensitive flows — contract acceptance, timesheet submission, invoice generation — across multiple countries with different regulatory requirements. Simplifying the experience without breaking compliance, or alienating experienced users who had adapted to the old system, was the central challenge.
Role
Lead product designer for the portal redesign. Worked with an in-house product manager, the legal and compliance team, and a development team of four engineers across six months.
Process
Began with a support ticket audit to identify the most common pain points, then conducted interviews with twelve consultants across four countries. The findings pointed to a core issue: the portal reflected the internal operations model, not the user’s mental model of their working relationship with emagine.
Restructured the information architecture around the consultant lifecycle — finding work, starting an engagement, submitting time, getting paid — and validated the new structure through tree testing before moving to visual design.
Selected Screens
Outcome
Support tickets related to portal navigation fell by 55% within three months of launch. Timesheet submission completion rate increased from 71% to 94%. The redesign was adopted as the template for emagine’s client-facing portal, currently in development.
Reflection
The most valuable early decision was the support ticket audit. It gave the team a shared, evidence-based picture of where the existing portal was failing — and made it much easier to gain stakeholder alignment on a full redesign rather than incremental fixes.