Case study · Fidelity NetBenefits

Standardizing navigation across a 70-team platform.

I replaced fragmented, team-by-team navigation decisions with one shared structural model that 70+ product teams could build from.

Role: Principal UX Designer / Director of UX Design
Domain: Enterprise benefits platform
Scope: Navigation, templates, reusable patterns, governance
Scale: 33M users · 70+ product teams

Thesis

The real problem wasn’t visual inconsistency.
It was the absence of a shared structural model.

Outcomes

33M

users supported

70+

product teams aligned

40%

faster delivery

67%

design-system adoption

Context

Why I was brought in

NetBenefits had the scale of a platform, but many product areas were still being designed like separate destinations.

My work focused on creating shared structures that helped teams make more consistent decisions across navigation, page layout, and reusable interaction patterns.

Audit

What I found

The audit showed that inconsistency was not just visual. Teams were making different structural decisions because they did not have a shared model to work from.

Inconsistent IA: Teams organized similar experiences in different ways, making it harder for users to build familiarity across the platform.
Visual variance: Pages often used similar components, but arranged them differently enough that the experience felt less cohesive.
Implementation friction: Without shared templates and pattern guidance, teams spent extra time recreating decisions that should have been reusable.

The opportunity was to define a system that could create consistency without forcing every product into the same shape.

Fragmented navigation models across NetBenefits products — The audit surfaced structural differences across products that could not be solved by visual styling alone.

Decision point

Standardize the structure, not every product.

The goal was not to make every NetBenefits experience identical. It was to create enough shared structure that teams could make consistent decisions while still preserving the needs of their specific product areas.

What changed: We defined reusable page structures, navigation logic, and interaction patterns that teams could apply across product areas.
Why it mattered: The work gave teams a shared basis for deciding where content belonged, how flows should be organized, and when patterns should be reused.
How it scaled: The system became part of the NetBenefits extension layer, supported by documentation, governance, and contribution workflows.

Outputs

A shared platform structure

The work translated platform decisions into reusable structures that teams could actually build with.

Shared navigation model

A clearer structure for how product areas related to one another and how users moved through the platform.

Reusable page templates

A set of flexible page-level structures that helped teams start from shared patterns instead of blank screens.

Interaction-pattern standards

Guidance for recurring moments like button groups, dialogs, next-best-action cards, and cross-product flows.

Four reusable page templates showing desktop and mobile versions of two hub levels, a feature spoke, and a focused task flow. — Templates gave teams a shared starting point for common page types.

Adoption

The work scaled because it was supported beyond the design file.

We documented the standards, connected them to implementation guidance, and created contribution workflows so teams could adopt, extend, and maintain the patterns over time.

Scaling standards through a NetBenefits extension layer between the enterprise design system and product teams — Documentation, governance, and contribution workflows helped the standards scale beyond a single design file.

Reflection

This work changed the role of design from producing screens to defining the structures other teams could build from.

The most important outcome was not a single template or pattern. It was a clearer platform model that helped teams make better decisions together.

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