askHR Platform Redesign

Role: Digital Design Lead

Key skills: Research, UX, UI, Accessibility, Stakeholder collaboration, and Design System foundations.

Location: Toronto, Canada

Timeline: 2024 – 2025

Overview

Scotiabank’s askHR is the bank’s internal self-service platform for employee resources and HR inquiries, serving over 90,000 users across Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Over time, the platform had evolved into a patchwork of links, documents, and widgets maintained by multiple teams, resulting in frustration, redundancy, and a high volume of inquiries to the HR contact centre.

As Digital Design Lead, I was responsible for the experience redesign of askHR, with a focus on usability, accessibility, and findability. Working in collaboration with HR, Product, Engineering, and Compliance teams, my goal was to transform a static repository of information into a clear, scalable, and human-centered experience.

This project became a cornerstone of Scotiabank’s internal transformation — reducing support overhead, empowering employees to self-serve confidently, and strengthening HR's perception as a modern, digital-first function.

Challenges

At project kickoff, analytics revealed that:

• 65 % of users visiting askHR immediately clicked “Contact Us” without reading or searching content.

• 50 % of HR inquiries sent to the Employee Services Centre could have been resolved through existing self-service materials.

• The interface was text-heavy and inconsistent, built on legacy templates that were not optimized for accessibility.

• Navigation was flat and redundant, with duplicate topics across multiple pages.

• The search experience returned irrelevant results, often linking to outdated or buried PDFs.

These issues created a frustrating loop for employees — leading to higher support costs, wasted time, and a poor digital perception of HR tools.

Research & Discovery

• Our first step was understanding user intent and context:

  • Conducted stakeholder interviews with HR business partners, content owners, and Employee Services agents.

  • Ran user shadowing sessions with employees from Canada, LATAM, and the Caribbean to observe search behaviour.

  • Mapped journeys for common tasks (benefits, payroll, time-off requests) to identify critical friction points.

  • Audited the content taxonomy, over 1,000 pages and documents scattered across redundant topics.

  • Benchmarked internal tools from competitors and external HR knowledge bases (Microsoft, Deloitte, TD Bank).

• These insights revealed that users didn’t just need better search; they required a complete rearchitecture of the information, with simpler visual hierarchies and contextual guidance.

Defining the Strategy

We reframed the problem statement:

“How might we help employees find reliable answers faster, without relying on direct HR contact?”

To achieve this, we established three guiding principles:

1. Simplify: Reduce content clutter and redundant navigation.

2. Empower: Give employees confidence through clarity and accessibility.

3. Scale: Design a system adaptable across languages, markets, and devices.

Design Process

1. Information Architecture

• Reorganized content into four primary categories: Benefits, Careers, Pay, and Wellbeing, replacing 26 redundant accordions.

• Implemented a faceted search model with contextual filters (country, topic, document type).

• Simplified hierarchy from four levels deep to two, reducing average clicks per task by 35 %.

2. UX & Interaction Design

• Introduced live search suggestions and direct-answer cards (avoiding dead-end result pages).

• Added document previews and summaries, reducing trial-and-error navigation.

• Embedded micro-interactions for visual feedback and orientation within long pages.

• Designed responsive layouts.

3. Accessibility & Inclusivity

• Applied WCAG 2.2 AA standards: colour contrast, keyboard navigation, ARIA roles, and focus states.

• Created bilingual templates (English / Spanish) to support cross-regional deployment.

• Collaborated with the Accessibility Team to validate all patterns and behaviours.

4. Collaboration & Delivery

• Partnered with HR stakeholders and content teams to clean and rewrite outdated materials.

• Documented UI specifications and component patterns in Figma for future scalability.

• Conducted usability testing with employees across 5 departments to validate clarity and flow.

Solutions Delivered

• New global navigation that unifies HR tools and resources in one intuitive layout.

• Contextual search engine integrated with predictive results and content tagging.

• Modernized content templates featuring summaries, links, and clear visual hierarchy.

• Improved mobile accessibility for on-the-go employee self-service.

Impact

• Reduced employee HR inquiries by 25 % within the first quarter post-launch.

• Increased task success rate from 54 % → 82 % in usability testing.

• Boosted employee satisfaction scores and self-service adoption.

• Decreased HR operational load, freeing teams for higher-value interactions.

• Established the foundation for a unified HR knowledge experience within Scotiabank’s digital ecosystem.

Why It Matters

The askHR redesign exemplifies how design can transform internal enterprise tools into empowering digital experiences.

By merging research, accessibility, and systems thinking, we improved not only the platform’s usability but also the relationship between employees and the organization.

This project reinforced Scotiabank’s vision of putting people first, not just in customer-facing products, but within its own culture.