UX Strategy for a Global Professional Association

The Challenge

The Organisation, a global professional membership and certification body, was running a multi-year digital transformation with fragmented ownership across membership, education, events, and certification teams. The website had grown organically for years: overlapping content, inconsistent navigation, no shared design standards, and no unified view of the member journey. Leadership needed a coherent UX strategy that could span all of these value streams, hold up as the organisation scaled, and translate cleanly into the technology roadmap IT was already executing against.

My Role

As the lead UX Architect, I led UX strategy end to end for the engagement: discovery, information architecture, research, design leadership, and governance. I worked directly with executive leadership, IT, marketing, membership, education, and events stakeholders to align a fragmented organisation around a single member-first vision, and translated that vision into structures other teams could actually build from.

Approach

Discovery and alignment. I ran UX discovery across the Membership, Education, Events, and Certification value streams to surface pain points and modernisation opportunities, then facilitated cross-functional alignment between UX, IT, data, and marketing so the roadmap reflected shared priorities rather than siloed requests.

Process design and engineering collaboration. The technology transformation depended on UX and engineering working from the same source of truth, so I helped build that structure directly by creating RACI matrices defining decision rights and handoff points between UX, IT, and business stakeholders, replacing ad hoc requests with a documented process for how design decisions moved into development. I also ran a recurring IT/UX check-in cadence to keep design and engineering synced on prioritisation, technical constraints, and feasibility as the roadmap evolved. I also contributed directly to the technology roadmap itself, representing the experience layer and overall strategy in a program otherwise driven by systems and infrastructure priorities.

Information architecture and content strategy. I led the IA redesign of the main website and its sub-sites: new page hierarchy, navigation strategy, and a content consolidation plan built to improve discoverability and SEO. I ran content inventories across educational, membership, and certification content, then applied a StoryBrand-based content methodology to align messaging with actual user goals instead of internal org structure.

Research and personas. I defined personas and journey maps for the certification program, membership, and learning audiences, grounded in analytics, stakeholder interviews, and customer feedback rather than assumption. I ran workshops with marketing, education, and subject matter experts to pressure-test audience needs before design work started.

I used AI tools such as Copilot and Claude to synthesise interview transcripts, survey responses, and stakeholder feedback into thematic findings, which shortened the path from first pass research to grounded personas and journey maps without losing the nuance in what people actually said.

Design leadership. I produced wireframes, user flows, and page frameworks for the membership and certification redesigns, led iterative design reviews with marketing, IT, and business stakeholders, and advocated for accessibility, progressive disclosure, and conversion-focused design throughout.

Outcomes

• Unified information architecture and navigation strategy for the main site and sub-sites
• Persona and journey map library grounding design decisions across three business lines
• Design System Starter Guide adopted as the organisation’s shared UX and accessibility standard
• Membership experience redesign built from current- and future-state journey mapping
• Executive-level UX, SEO, and governance recommendations incorporated into the technology roadmap