Role
UX Designer – Led interviews and cross-regional workshops; synthesized insights into a unified persona set, journey maps, and site architecture.
Client
Confidential – Global industrial-technology enterprise
Team
Design (2 UX designers + SV), Advisory (2 PMO, 1 SME)
A global industrial-tech company operated separate regional websites, each with its own structure, visual language, security rules, and content management. The difference in navigation patterns and visual styles led to an inconsistent customer experience globally, making it difficult for customers to recognize them as one cohesive solutions provider. Internally, marketing teams lacked a common foundation for campaigns and couldn't reuse assets across regions which should be globally uniform.
We had to identify global business priorities from the stakeholders’ perspectives, coordinate workshops across time zones, and untangle more than twenty pre-existing personas created by each region that often overlapped or contradicted one another.
CHALLENGE
Siloed regional platforms
Seven regional teams had been operating their own websites in silos, resulting in inconsistent customer experience across markets.
Unclear global value proposition
Difficult to reuse assets globally because each region managed its own CMS and design system.
OBJECTIVE
Globally unified digital customer experience
Establish a single, globally governed web framework that ensures a consistent brand and digital experience while giving regional teams the flexibility to address local needs.
INTERVIEWS AND WORKSHOPS
Our team set out to understand the current state, articulate a unified customer-experience vision, and create a phased roadmap to migrate each region. We started with competitive and heuristic audits to establish a baseline and quick wins. Interviews and workshops with executives, marketers, engineers, and customers revealed pain points – from inconsistent part-number searches to regional security variations. We ran sessions across Europe, North America, and Japan to align on findings, prioritize issues, and define a global north-star experience.
PERSONAS TO JOURNEY MAPPING
Redefining personas was a major challenge. Each region had its own set tailored to local markets, with different structures, names, and purposes, so a simple merge wasn’t feasible.
What we found common in the personas across all regions were that:
Across regions, we consistently saw five customer types: End Users, Distributors, Manufacturers (OEM), System Integrators (SI), and Panel Makers.
Each type spans three levels—Executive, Management, and Field/Technical—yielding up to 15 personas per region.
We partnered with each regional team to align on goals, use cases, and success criteria for a unified global set. The result preserved local nuance while giving everyone a shared reference for design and content.
Click image to view an enlarged example of a persona
Building on the unified personas, we mapped current and ideal journeys. I created a reusable journey-map template to compare the numerous personas we had side-by-side, speeding production and review. (This template was later distributed within the UX team at Avanade, currently being used in diverse client projects!)
Click image to view an enlarged example of a journey map
VALUE PROPOSITION
The outputs fed directly into our discussions on global value proposition, which defined how our north-star experience should feel, with future visions on how they can be applied to the global web experience.
SITE STRUCTURE
We translated the vision into a modular site structure draft. Our focus was on ensuring the global components drove brand consistency, while local layers accommodated language, regulation, and product-line differences.
IMPACT
Our research analysis and governance blueprint provided regional teams with clear principles, a shared vocabulary, and a phased rollout plan balancing global consistency with local agility. The reusable journey-map template reduced documentation time by half, and bilingual facilitation reduced misalignment between headquarters and regions. We also enforced version control and bilingual documentation to prevent misinterpretations across languages. The project later received internal recognition within Avanade for cross-cultural collaboration!
TAKEAWAY
When we joined the project, regions were at different stages of their website redesigns—something neither our team nor the client had fully recognized. That mismatch created avoidable friction. The lesson: align early by involving all stakeholders in setting goals, expectations, and plans to avoid any misunderstandings.
At a foundational level, changing a framework so closely tied to the company’s vocabulary was challenging. We proposed shifting personas from demographic groups to behavioral archetypes to reflect real needs, but renaming wasn’t feasible because the existing terminology was embedded deeply across teams and changing it would create confusion. Both sides had to come to an agreement by having countless discussions on what we can compromise.
