Applied Materials needed to redesign its fragmented HR experience for 36,000+ employees across 26 countries. Employees struggled with disconnected portals, inconsistent navigation, and outdated content, leading to heavy reliance on HR support. The project evolved from a portal redesign into a broader initiative focused on self-service and AI-powered employee support.
As UX Lead and later Product Owner, I led research, UX strategy, interaction design, and AI initiatives across the platform. I designed scalable self-service workflows, predictive-intelligence support tools, and helped launch an AI assistant in Microsoft Teams, improving search adoption from 3% to 95% while reducing HR dependency at scale. This project spanned 5 years and included 2 major portal design updates as well as an AI implementation.
From the beginning of the project in 2020 I realized that the optimal user experience was to have one place for all employee digital experiences. What we were facing in HR was the same across all departments. To combat this, I coordinated with designers from IT to align our designs and started designing for the future — a single unified portal experience.
The Unified Portal is currently going through executive leadership buy-in. We want to continue to expand the platform to all departments and create a single digital experience for all Applied Materials employees globally.
30,000+ employees globally. Internal tools across HR, IT, Legal and Facilities all on ServiceNow — but spread across 25+ country portals with no unified navigation. Search utilization sat at 5%.
Interviews, focus groups, surveys, ticket analysis, usage analytics, and A/B testing converged on the same problems: search wasn't trusted, navigation caused abandonment, and self-service couldn't scale culturally.
We deliberately cut localized COE landing pages and per-persona features to stay focused on foundational consolidation — the work that would make everything else possible.
All HR functions — Onboarding, Employee Engagement, Case Submission — under a single homepage with a Campaign Carousel, category sidebar, and unified search.
Unified taxonomy, personalized shortcuts, and dedicated COE pages. Smart Form consolidated 50 forms into one funnel — cutting routing time by 5 hours and reducing misdirected tickets by 72%.
Content required interpretation. HR bandwidth couldn't scale. Users needed to be met where they already were. Technology: ChatGPT + ServiceNow, delivered inside Microsoft Teams.
Quick fixes would have compounded long-term complexity. We chose to simplify the information architecture and build governance frameworks — slower short-term, the right foundation for AI.
Deployed where employees already worked — answering HR questions in real time, without a portal visit. Designed around action-oriented outputs, measurable accuracy, and a trust-building metrics framework.
The hardest part wasn't building the AI — it was knowing whether it was working. I designed a four-category framework to measure trust, usage, sentiment, and content quality across every interaction, then mapped every signal to a specific metric in the dashboard.
After five years of improving the HR portal, the same fragmentation appeared across IT, Facilities, Legal, Procurement, Travel, and Business Units. HR was still the catchall. The insight that had been forming since 2020 became the vision for Phase 3.
The Applied Materials Employee Center unifies HR, IT, Facilities, Legal, and Procurement under a single portal — addressing the root cause rather than optimizing individual silos. Currently in executive review.