Enterprise app
yourHD
When the biggest UX problem isn't the interface.
- Client
- Hastings Deering
- Role
- Product Design
- Key responsibilities
- Discovery, Facilitation, Usability testing, Design
- Timeline
- 3+ months
Digital adoption in first quarter (target: 80%)
Hours returned to the business (target: 24K)
Forms submitted digitally
Most digital transformation projects fail at the technology. This one nearly failed at the people.
The reality
A digital environment built by accumulation, not design.
Hastings Deering runs a complex, high-stakes operation. Mechanics. Warehouse staff. Field technicians. People who need to move fast and work safely, every single day.
10,000+ forms. Scattered across SharePoint. No clear ownership. No clear path. No single person who could tell you where anything lived.
And this wasn't the first attempt to fix it. Smaller digital solutions had been rolled out before, aimed at exactly these pain points. They didn't stick. Employees were confused, regressed to the old SharePoint ways, and built their own private systems for finding information. The tools existed. The trust didn't.
28% of employees told us information was scattered across too many systems. But that number felt conservative — the rest had simply stopped trying. They'd built workarounds. When the basics didn't work? They skipped steps. Prioritised speed over safety.
That's the moment a UX problem becomes a safety problem.
I never know where to go or how to find information to do my work.
What we found
Interviewed 22 employees across different levels — operational staff, managers, and business leaders.
01
Difficulty finding information
Employees struggled to locate the tools and resources needed to do their work.
02
Limited knowledge sharing across sites
Lessons learned and best practices were rarely shared between teams and locations.
03
Lack of training and support
Technicians often felt unsupported when navigating internal systems and processes.
From insight to opportunity
Concept exploration
With a clear understanding of employee pain points, I created a series of concept features to explore how yourHD could meaningfully improve the employee experience — certification hub, home screen, super search, approvals, content sharing, career.
The turning point
They kept voting for one thing: their home screen.
I ran dot-voting sessions, putting printed concepts in front of employees and asking them to place stickers on what genuinely mattered to them.
The pattern was immediate. They didn't care about the content library. They didn't prioritise search. They kept voting for quick access, favourites, and getting to daily tools without looking for them.
01
Personalisation
Information and functionality must be accessible, relevant and personalised to them, their role and their work.
02
Complement, not complicate
Quick actions to the most commonly used forms, documents, systems and tools.
03
Ease of use and empowerment
Help people understand why things changed. Remove the old way — don't offer the choice.
The solution
Not your average employee application.
yourHD is a single gateway, giving employees clear direction, standardised workflows and the confidence to get on with their job.
Built from the dot-votes. Quick Links, Forms, and Hubs sit on the surface because that's exactly what employees kept voting for: daily tools without the hunt.
The platform reaches out first. Expiring certifications and announcements find the employee. A deliberate reversal of the old model, where every answer had to be hunted down.
Answers before questions. Certifications, expiry dates, and learning progress in one view, designed so nobody has to ask their manager where they stand, or vice versa.
Personal to role and work. Every screen filters to the employee: their role, their site, their tools. The research asked for relevance, so relevance is the default, on any device.
What really happened
89% digital adoption in the first quarter, against an 80% target.
Employees praised the clarity, managers appreciated the structure, and union reps were eager to see the solution rolled out further.
Digital adoption in first quarter (target: 80%)
Hours returned to the business (target: 24K)
News and announcements viewed in a single month
Key takeaways
01
Listening is the strategy
Previous digital fixes failed because employees weren't brought along. Bringing them into the journey, from voting to testing to shaping, is what made this one stick.
02
Onboarding is design work
It's the designer's job to help users land: guide them in, and make sure they know help is there every step of the way. Adoption is designed, not hoped for.
03
The backlog is a roadmap
The concepts employees voted down aren't dead. They're a tested feature backlog, ready to build as the platform earns more trust.
The platform didn't need to be comprehensive. It needed to feel like it already knew you.
Next case study
HD Career Progression
The path forward existed. Nobody could see it.