Malak Aboufreikha Portfolio

Capability Catalogue

Redesigned the CIP Catalogue, a centralized repository for projects completed by Eaton teams, to bridge the gap between projects and people. The redesign focuses on accelerating search, streamlining navigation for new joiners, and making organizational knowledge highly visible and accessible across the global enterprise.

Role

UX Designer

Employer

Platform

Web/ Desktop

Background

Large enterprise organizations often suffer from internal visibility gaps, where incredible work completed by one team remains completely invisible to another. The CIP Catalogue was created to solve this at Eaton, serving as a centralized hub that documents completed projects and showcases internal capabilities.

Beyond acting as a technical archive, the catalogue serves as a crucial onboarding guide for new joiners and a high-level reference tool for upper management when presenting Eaton’s operational capabilities to external stakeholders.

Problem Space

While the CIP Catalogue holds invaluable institutional knowledge, the existing user experience creates artificial barriers to data retrieval. Because enterprise documentation is inherently complex, users frequently face friction that disrupts their workflow.

Key challenges driving this study include:

Onboarding Friction: New joiners, the most frequent user base, struggle to navigate the ecosystem due to highly dense, jargon-heavy content.
Naming Convention Confusion: High fragmentation in how teams name and classify projects makes browsing highly unpredictable.
Inefficient Access Loops: A high click-depth requirement forces users to jump through multiple navigation layers just to find basic project context.

Research & Discovery

Across the organisation, work was happening everywhere, but often in isolation. Teams operated within their own lanes, with limited visibility into what others were building, researching, or learning.

This resulted in valuable work becoming fragmented, difficult to discover, and at times, going unnoticed altogether. Projects ranged from early‑stage research to fully productionised solutions, yet there was no unified way to surface, connect, or showcase this work.

The goal of this platform was to bring visibility to all projects, regardless of their maturity, and to shift from siloed knowledge to a shared, accessible ecosystem of ideas, and practices. Instead of organising content strictly by team, we aimed to present it as guides, themes, and capabilities that anyone across the organisation could explore and learn from.

“We’re all doing great work, but it’s hard to know what other teams are working on.”

“Some of our most interesting work never gets surfaced outside the team.”

“Everything lives in different places, you have to know where to look.”

“It’s not that the work isn’t documented, it’s just not accessible.”

Key Insights & User Behaviors

Insight 1: Transforming a Static Text Block into a Dynamic Launchpad (Homepage Redesign)

Before: Crucial context about the platform was trapped on an "About Us" page that users rarely visited due to deep, fragmented navigation. Once found, it confronted users with dense, exhausting blocks of text that failed to showcase the catalog's actual value.

After: Re-architected the entire platform entry point by promoting this page into a centralized, value-driven Homepage.

To drive immediate utility, a "Most Used Tools" header was pinned directly to the top, enabling users to jump straight into the catalog or look up a corporate acronym with a single click.

Massive text walls were replaced with modular, high-level snippets of the ecosystem—featuring scannable carousels for recent articles and trending resources.

Hick’s Law — Reducing Cognitive Overload

UX Law: Hick’s Law (Consolidating high-frequency actions into prominent, immediate tap targets dramatically reduces decision-making time and interaction friction

Insight 2: Contextual Clarity & Content Discovery (Deep Dives Directory)

Before: The original "Capabilities" directory was ambiguously labeled, forcing users to guess what kind of content lived inside. Furthermore, articles were presented without metadata or sorting mechanisms, making it impossible for users to judge if a piece of documentation was relevant to them before clicking it.

After: Relabeled the directory to "Deep Dives" to instantly align with the user’s mental model of looking for comprehensive case studies and articles.

Implemented a robust meta-tagging taxonomy on every article card—explicitly surfacing the category, AI integration indicators, and demo availability.

These tags were tied directly into a global filter system, allowing users to effortlessly curate and parse the article library based on their immediate project needs.

Jakob’s Law — Leveraging Familiar Patterns

Using descriptive, standard labeling conventions and predictive tag-filtering patterns that users are deeply accustomed to across modern web platforms

The Collaborative Co-Design Workshop

To move beyond assumptions and design a resource architecture that truly served the enterprise, I facilitated a live, time-boxed co-design workshop with core CIP platform users. The goal was to uncover how different personas naturally categorize information and to discover structural alignment between varying user mental models.

Workshop Logistics & Framework The session was hosted remotely using a hybrid setup to maximize engagement and capture structured feedback efficiently:

The Platform: Conducted visually on Miro with a synchronous group call on Microsoft Teams.

The Structure: Divided into strictly time-boxed phases to maintain focus and prevent fatigue. Each structural iteration was allocated a specific duration, moving the group forward dynamically when the timer went off.

The Finale: The remaining time was reserved for open Q&A, general brainstorming, and cross-functional feedback alignment.

The 4-Board Testing Matrix

Structure #1: Content Type(Format-Based)

This answers: “What kind of resource am I looking for?”

Structure #2: End-to-end- workflow (Lifecycle-based)

This answers: “What am I trying to do right now in the project?”

Structure #3: Need (Goal -Based)

This answers: “What am I trying to solves right now?”

The Blank Canvas: Free-form sandbox

To ensure guidance didn't incentivize bias.

Workshop Synthesis & Key Takeaways

By analyzing the interactive sticky notes, feedback walls, and the custom structures proposed on the blank canvas, I uncovered exactly "where everyone's head was at" across different roles.

To systematically digest the volume of qualitative data, I synthesized the workshop results using Miro Assist, cluster-mapping the sticky notes into clear behavioral themes.

The data highlighted a clear divide in how different groups view and use the platform's resources:

The New Joiner / Occasional User:

Thought exclusively in terms of their immediate goals and workflow actions (e.g., "I just need a guide, I don't care which team wrote it").

“I don’t know the structure well enough to search by team.”

“I just want to get unblocked quickly, without figuring out who owns what.”

The Veteran / Power User:

Naturally thought in terms of internal team boundaries and departmental ownership because they already knew who produced what.

“Most of what I use comes from familiar groups, I don’t often look beyond that.”

“If I don’t know which team owns it, it’s harder to find.”

Voice of the User: Critical Themes

1. The Danger of Team Silos & Corporate Jargon

Users explicitly noted that organizing strictly by internal teams created a heavy mental burden for new users and accidentally siloed information, discouraging cross-team collaboration.

"Maybe tricky for first time users, they must first decide which team might own the thing."

"Grouping by team might discourage people outside of that team using the resources. Might subconsciously think 'it's not for me'."

2. The Power of Goal-Oriented Categories

When presented with structured, workflow-centric labels, users felt an immediate sense of clarity. The categories themselves began acting as a guide, reducing the pressure to guess where files lived.

"I like this approach, reduces decision burden. It's clear the intent for what each category means."

"Coming here to the planning session to see what I need to consider works well—the category itself is teaching me rather than me trying to think what item should be deployed when."

3. Leveraging Search & Immediate Utility

A recurring piece of feedback was that users heavily favor direct execution over deep browsing, validating the decision to bring critical tools to the surface level.

"I typically just search what I am looking for, so maybe having stuff listed in the most used structure would be more helpful."

"I use the search bar more than the filters."

Instead of picking one structure and alienating half the user base, the workshop insights led me to design a balanced, hybrid framework that honors both workflows:

The Primary Layer:

Structured by workflow (Guides, Principles, Workflows, Learning Library) so any user can browse successfully without corporate context.

The Accelerator Filter:

Integrated the previous team structure into persistent chip filters, giving power users the speed they need to isolate departmental assets instantly.

Insight 3: Shifting from Corporate Silos to User Workflows (Resources Restructuring)

Before: Resources were strictly categorized by internal department teams. This forced users to have pre-existing knowledge of internal corporate structures just to guess which team owned a specific guide, severely hindering new joiners who lacked organizational context.

After: Conducted a collaborative co-design workshop driven by direct user input to overhaul the information architecture.

Shifted the entire taxonomy from team-centric to workflow-centric, organizing resources into transparent, action-oriented categories: Guides, Workflows, and Learning Library.

To balance speed with organizational accountability, team tags were preserved directly on each resource card as contact indicators to foster a sense of ownership, while dynamic team filter chips allow power users to isolate departmental files instantly.

Mental Model Alignment: Flexibility and Efficiency of Use

Organizing information around the user's actual daily goals and tasks rather than abstract corporate structures minimizes mental processing fatigue

Insight 4: Unified Brand Cohesion & Trust (Native Support Framework)

Before: To ask a question or submit support info, users were abruptly pushed out of the platform interface into a generic, unstyled third-party Microsoft Form. This jarring shift broke user immersion, reduced completion rates, and made the platform feel fragmented.

After: Designed a built-in, native Contact Page experience seamlessly integrated into the catalog's design system.

By maintaining unified typography, input fields, and visual styles, the form feels like a secure, organic extension of the product, lowering completion anxiety and vastly improving the overall aesthetic experience.

The Aesthetic-Usability Effect: Consistency and Standards

sers perceive a unified, visually cohesive system as more secure, professional, and reliable than a patchwork of disconnected forms

Outcomes

This project taught me how to work end‑to‑end across research, stakeholder collaboration, and iteration, from running interviews and validating ideas with users to aligning with leadership and adapting to technical and delivery constraints. It strengthened my ability to design not just for users, but within real organisational contexts.

Increased visibility across teams

Projects that were previously siloed or overlooked are now discoverable in a single, unified space, regardless of whether they are in research or production.

From static information to interactive exploration

By introducing demo entry points, project pages, and guided flows, users can move beyond reading about work to experiencing it directly, making the platform more engaging and actionable.

Shift from team‑centric to goal‑centric navigation

Users, especially new joiners, can now find what they need based on their task or challenge, rather than needing prior knowledge of team structures.

More equitable exposure for all work

Both research‑heavy efforts and polished solutions are presented within the same ecosystem, ensuring valuable work is consistently surfaced and recognised.

A centralised and intuitive homepage as a discovery hub

The homepage acts as a single entry point into the ecosystem, surfacing key capabilities, featured projects, and themes. It reduces reliance on prior knowledge and enables users to quickly orient themselves and start exploring.

Key Takeaways

I learned how valuable it is to engage directly with different user types, from new joiners to experienced team members, and how their perspectives can challenge assumptions. This pushed me to design around real user needs rather than internal structures, balancing feedback from both users and leadership.

I learned how to navigate cross‑team collaboration and organisational complexity, speaking with different teams to understand their work and ensuring it was fairly represented. This helped me grow in facilitating alignment across multiple stakeholders.

I learned how to work closely with stakeholders to translate complex ideas into interactive experiences, not just static content. Through iterations and feedback sessions, I developed a stronger understanding of how people engage with products, not just read them.

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