Cadence
Turn a barely-documented, month-old platform into a working site — and a plan the next team could repeat.
When I came on, SharePoint 2013 was less than a month old. Instead of a big-bang cutover, Cadence ran a pilot: migrate one content-heavy team’s portal end to end, work out every kink, and come out with a design and migration plan repeatable across the whole company. I led the usability work.
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Designing for a platform the whole industry was still figuring out.
The honest challenge wasn’t the QA content — it was that the platform was so new that almost no one, including me, knew what it could actually do. There were no established patterns, no community wisdom, no back catalog to lean on.
So before I designed anything, I learned it in the open — and we named the assumption I was least sure of and spent budget to close it: two Microsoft consultants, brought on to make sure we understood the platform and built the pilot to be genuinely scalable.
The old site wasn’t just outdated — it was unadopted.
I spidered the entire QA portion of the existing install, sat with the team to find what was missing, and walked the site with leadership to sort outdated from essential. What surfaced reframed the assignment: the old site was too complex to be worth the effort, so the team had never really adopted it. The pilot wasn’t only a version upgrade — it was a chance to fix the adoption problem.
Two screens that were the argument for the whole migration.
With the IA settled, I designed around SharePoint 2013’s two anchor capabilities — community and file sharing — and built two core screens for the consultants to implement.
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A space that felt alive, not archival.
Featured communities up top, a “What’s Hot” and “Recent Communities” row beneath, each tile carrying its own member and discussion counts — so the space read as active rather than a filing cabinet.
A Q&A that stayed navigable under load.
Modeled loosely on the Stack Overflow pattern — a question with a highlighted best reply, up/down voting on responses, a Top Contributors rail, and sort controls — so a busy thread stayed readable. These two screens were the proof that community and file sharing could make QA’s work more discoverable, not just relocated.
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A design that worked for QA but couldn’t scale would have failed the goal.
The KPI wasn’t a vanity metric — it was that the project had to be completed in a way that was scalable across the entire company. That constraint sat behind every layout and content decision. The deliverable wasn’t one good screen; it was a process solid enough that other teams could repeat it without me in the room.
When you’re first to work with something new, humility and the right expertise beat bravado.
The pilot launched right before I rolled off — QA’s quality portal went live on SharePoint 2013, built on a design and migration approach meant to be handed to the next team and the next after that. Naming the assumption I was least sure of, and spending budget to close it, is what made the pilot scalable instead of merely finished.
No adoption or rollout figures were captured, so I don’t quote any — the outcome was a live site and a repeatable blueprint.