Human Resources · department listing template
The intranet every CIB employee opens before they talk to a single customer. It had grown for years without a designer. Then it got one.
The intranet had grown the way enterprise tools grow: one department at a time, one request at a time, for years. HR looked nothing like Audit. Audit looked nothing like the news feed. Every page was somebody's small kingdom, and no page was anybody's front door.
An employee looking for a policy, a form, or a colleague's extension had to already know where it lived. The intranet answered questions for the people who wrote it — not the people who opened it.
Dozens of departments, hundreds of pages, one designer. Designing each page was never going to work — and worse, it would have rebuilt the same inconsistency we were there to fix.
So the deliverable wasn't pages. It was a tiered template system: a department listing template, a content page template, a feed template. Every team in the bank got a page that felt like theirs — built from parts that behaved like everyone else's.
New department? No design request needed. The system already knew what their page looked like.
Below the department landings sits the content tier — the pages where the intranet actually answers questions. The bank's history, the card product manuals, policies, document libraries: wildly different content, identical bones.
Hero, sections, cards, documents — the same components in different proportions. An editor in Audit and an editor in Marketing were building with the same kit, which is why the intranet stopped drifting the moment it shipped.
Consumer apps have users. Intranets have owners. Every template decision had to survive HR's forms, Audit's policies, the news team's publishing schedule, and the affiliates' brand requirements — at the same time, on the same components.
This is why I still call it the most complex UX problem I've solved. Not because any single screen was hard — because every screen had to be the same screen, and every owner had a reason theirs should be different. The design work was half systems thinking, half diplomacy.
The intranet is where I learned to think in templates and components before it was fashionable to call everything a design system. One designer can't out-design an organization's entropy screen by screen. A system can.
Everything I've built since — the component library at CIB, RTL systems across five brands at Beyond ONE — starts from the same move: find the pattern that makes the next hundred decisions automatic.