A new vision for Woolworths’ team member platform, TeamSpace
When I joined the project as a Senior UX Designer, TeamSpace had fewer than 40 weekly users and no clear purpose. Over the next year, I led a full strategic reset that reframed the problem, redefined the vision, and set the foundation for what is now the central platform for Woolworths’ 10,000+ support team members.
This work helped the team win an internal innovation award two years in a row and the success of our core ‘People’ pages created a model that was later scaled to the entire 200,000+ store team.
Research • Product Strategy • UX Design • Information Architecture •Prototyping • Content Design
A platform at a standstill
The issues with TeamSpace were a visible symptom of a larger problem. While the platform itself was failing to gain any traction, the root causes were systemic:
No perceived value: Core functionality like news and app links were already handled by other tools. Employees had well-established workarounds, leaving no compelling reason to visit the platform.
A fragmented digital ecosystem: Hundreds of ungoverned and inconsistent Google Sites created a confusing web of information. An official 'People Portal’ - a company knowledge base meant to be a source of truth, was instead a confusing library of dense policy documentation. Content across both these Google Sites and the portal was sometimes duplicated, often outdated and occasionally contradictory. Employees couldn't trust what they found and instead had to rely on word-of-mouth or the specific knowledge of their colleagues - an unsustainable system for critical HR and policy information.
A blocked team: The internal team had been working on the platform for years with little progress. They were under pressure to demonstrate value quickly, or risk the project being disbanded.
The initial brief was for a visual refresh. However, early research confirmed this would be a superficial fix for deeper, strategic problems. The platform didn't need a new look. It needed purpose, a reason to exist and a vision for it’s future.
Before: TeamSpace was a cluttered, rarely accessed and directionless platform
Recognising the need for change
A pivotal moment in this project came in a honest conversation with a key project leader. I shared my assessment that continuing with minor uplifts would not solve the core issue of user value. We could continue to refine the existing product, but unless we were prepared to fundamentally rethink its purpose, it would not succeed.
This conversation marked a turning point, beginning a shift of my role from a designer focused on execution to a strategic partner responsible for shaping the product's direction. It provided the clearance to pause the superficial work and focus on the more important question: What job does this platform really need to do for Woolworths’ employees?
To help answer this, I facilitated a crucial alignment workshop with the project’s leadership team. To gain support for the strategic approach in this session, I made the employee experience tangible, developing a comprehensive employee journey map based on dozens of interviews, breaking down the employee lifecycle into four distinct stages: Getting started & onboarding, Daily life & support, Career growth & progression, and Moving on & offboarding.
Each stage highlighted significant wider issues in employee experience - for example, an employee struggling to find a clear answer on bereavement leave amidst dense legal policies. We reinforced these qualitative stories with data, such as the fact that employees' belief in their career future at Woolworths dropped from over 70% to 44% after three years. The journey map and posters brought into focus the systemic issues for the entire team that we had the opportunity to solve and clarified the need for a new direction.
A small selection of assets used to help drive our vision for the platform re-design.
Rebuilding TeamSpace around what matters
With a new mandate and support from the leadership team, I led the design of the new platform from the ground up. The focus was on creating an active, indispensable daily tool. Updates included:
Transforming the homepage from a passive news feed into a personalised dashboard designed to make an employee's day easier. It now surfaces relevant news (like team birthdays) and integrates their calendar to show upcoming events - both company wide and personal. We added a dedicated ‘Actions’ section for core tasks like booking leave or viewing a payslip and provided quick access to bookmarked apps. High-value widgets for checking rewards points and leave balances - gently prompting employees with excess leave to take a break - helped make the homepage a genuinely valuable destination.
Developing a centralised, trusted source of truth. Our research showed one of the major most critical needs for employees was a place to get answers to their questions about working at Woolworths, however the existing 'People Portal' was a major source of frustration. This insight elevated the task of absorbing and restructuring its content from a simple migration to a core part of our strategy, directly addressing the pain points we'd identified. Inspired by best-in-class sites like GOV.UK, I designed a new task-oriented IA based on our research. We replaced vague categories like 'Pay and the Basics' with clear, journey-based sections like Pay, Leave, and Careers.
A content-first approach to policy
To solve the problem of finding critical information, we moved away from simply linking to policy documents. For sensitive topics like bereavement leave, this meant designing a content-first experience where the page itself provided a clear, human-readable summary of the entitlement, with the full policy available as a secondary reference. This small but significant change demonstrated our new user-first approach, moving from a journey of hunting to one of immediate clarity.
The new homepage brings key info together with widgets for Today, office availability, leave balance and benefits.
The updated company information pages. Clear navigation, visuals showing who the content is for and plain-English answers instead of lengthy pages of policy text.
Collaboration to deliver the vision
While I was responsible for driving the design vision and strategy, this transformation was brought to life through a close partnership with a talented cross-functional team. I worked closely with a brilliant product manager who supported our new direction and a team of skilled developers who we collaborated closely with to the deliver a custom experience on the Salesforce platform in a limited amount of time. My role was often to bridge these stakeholders, ensuring our path forward was ambitious, user-centric and technically viable.
Navigating politics with pragmatism
Alongside the 'People' section, we also designed an 'Apps & Sites' directory to give employees a central place to find tools and team-specific resources. My vision for the ‘People’ section was for it to be the single source of all official company information, which meant eliminating the hundreds of duplicative team sites that could live in the new directory.
I advocated for this, but it was a battle I lost. A decision was made for business units to continue to have their own dedicated sites. Instead of accepting this as a defeat, I pivoted. I led the effort to create standardised, accessible and easy-to-use site templates within the new ‘Sites’ section of the platform. While this meant some content duplication remained, it solved the larger problems of inconsistency, poor quality, and lack of governance. It was a pragmatic compromise that demonstrated how to deliver value within complex organisational constraints.
Before: scattered and inconsistent
After: accessible, organised and consistent
A 250x increase in engagement and a foundation for the continuing platform
The new platform was a success, delivering measurable results and creating lasting change.
Massive growth in engagement: weekly active users grew from a low of ~40 to over 85% of the 10,000+ Australian staff and 96% of New Zealand staff.
Company recognition: The platform's success and innovative approach were recognised internally, winning the Woolworths Group Innovation Award two years in a row.
Scaled for the wider organisation: The design and structure of the knowledge pages proved was later adapted and rolled out to the entire 200,000+ network of store team members, forming the foundation of their own knowledge base - the design of which I also oversaw.
Positive user sentiment: The platform is now a trusted resource, with qualitative feedback frequently praising its ease of use and the convenience of having everything in one place.
A legacy design maturity: The user-centred processes I introduced, including regular research cadences, continue to be used today. My work helped get design a seat at the strategic table and the trust I built now empowers the team that continues to evolve the platform.
TeamSpace continues to grow as a platform that now underpins the organisation. It has grown into the central hub for team members, supporting everything from careers and onboarding to benefits, training, celebrations and everyday tasks, with new experiences continuing to be built today.
A growing platform designed to scale - now the central hub for information, tools and experiences within the organisation.
Lessons learned
In a stalled system, the first job is to create momentum, not perfection.
Taking action, by having candid conversations and showing ambitious concepts, was essential to break the team's stagnation and earn the runway for future, more methodical work. Sometimes the most strategic move is simply to get the team unstuck.
Influence isn't granted, it's earned through trust.
I didn't start with a seat at the strategic table. I earned it by listening deeply, making user pain understandable and consistently demonstrating a path to a better experience. That trust became a form of capital that created lasting change.
In complex organisations, pragmatic compromise is a form of winning.
Losing the battle over eliminating team sites taught me the lesson that success isn’t always about achieving an ideal vision; it's about navigating the political realities of the system to deliver the best possible outcome within given constraints.
A final reflection on growth
On a personal note, this project was a period of great professional growth. I was entrusted with a significant level of responsibility and, in many ways, was thrown in the deep end to lead the design effort. Rising to that challenge taught me how to navigate complex organisational politics, build trust with senior leadership and make strategic decisions. It was the project where I solidified my capabilities as a strategic designer, moving beyond just execution to shape a product's future.
Ultimately, the moment that felt like real success came months later, seeing a team member open their browser for the day and have the platform I designed appear as their homepage, using it not because they had to, but because it made their life at work a little bit better.