Esri.com

Design strategy for an enterprise website at scale

The Client

Esri

My Role

Research & Insights Creative Strategy Art Direction System Design CMS Migrations

Project Team

Amanda McKinley Carl Bender Paul Briseño

About this project

The Goal

Create a design strategy that would unify Esri.com across thousands of pages

Esri leads the geospatial technology market, and their site serves over 2 million visitors annually. But the experience felt like it came from multiple companies. Different teams had built their own approaches over decades, creating visual chaos that made complex technology even harder to understand.

The Problem

A fragmented site built by many teams for over a decade

The visual language was inconsistent and outdated. Dense, technical content made the platform inaccessible to newcomers while still serving power users poorly. Years of decentralized decision-making had created a site that reflected how it was built: by different teams working in isolation without any real collaborative alignment to consider the whole.

The Solution

Focus on people and process, not just pixels and patterns

I saw this as a systems problem that required changing how teams worked together, not just how pages looked. The visual strategy had to come with new workflows that would actually stick. I built a framework around three pillars: storytelling templates that made complex technology clear, collaborative processes that brought stakeholders into design earlier, and flexible guidelines that empowered teams while maintaining consistency. The work became about teaching the organization how to design cohesively while respecting each team's expertise.

The Impact

The framework now governs hundreds of thousands of pages.

Design/stakeholder friction was reduced, go-to-market timelines improved, and trust in the design team grew across the organization. And the new designs are performing well:

45%

increase in core product page views

$100K+

saved for reducing technical support cases created

11%

improvement in positive impression ratings

About this project