Toyota Connect — Unifying the Global Employee Experience
Business Development, Creative Director, Designer
The Challenge
Toyota, a global leader in automotive manufacturing and innovation, was facing a common enterprise challenge: digital fragmentation leading to diminished internal engagement.
The existing internal resources and communication tools were siloed, making it difficult for employees to quickly find institutional knowledge, assist colleagues with specialized skills, and connect authentically across different departments and global offices. This fragmentation resulted in wasted time, slower decision-making, and a lack of visual cohesion that failed to reflect the brand’s commitment to quality and design. The core problem was transforming a transactional digital workspace into a holistic, engaging platform that truly improved the employees' everyday work lives.
The Vision
The goal was to design and deploy a unified, visually engaging, and highly intuitive intranet platform—Toyota Connect—that would become the central digital hub for all employees worldwide.
Our vision was to create a human-centered experience that moved beyond simply storing documents and instead focused on deep, meaningful employee connections. This required establishing a clear information architecture (IA) and a premium, responsive visual design that matched the Toyota brand’s high standards.
Key Objectives:
Simplify Search & Discovery: Reduce the friction involved in locating experts, data, and resources across the organization.
Enable Seamless Collaboration: Provide easy, intuitive pathways for employees to assist and communicate with cohorts, fostering a stronger sense of team.
Elevate the Visual Experience: Introduce a modern, clean UI/UX to create a highly adopted and enjoyable digital environment that encourages daily use.
The Solution
My involvement, spanning from the initial client pursuit through design execution, focused on aligning business goals with genuine user needs, culminating in a responsive, scalable, and highly accessible intranet platform.
Phase 1: Deep Discovery & IA Redefinition
Business Development & Pursuit: Actively participated in securing the client engagement by defining the project scope and demonstrating our team's strategic UX capabilities.
User Research Leadership: Led card sorting exercises and extensive nationwide employee interviews. These activities were critical in identifying the core pain points and establishing a user-centric information architecture, moving from department-siloed navigation to function-based discovery (e.g., finding "people" or "data" vs. navigating to the "Finance" folder).
Phase 2: Creative Direction & UX Design
Creative Direction: Influenced the design initiative by establishing a new visual language for the intranet—one that was clean, fast, and mobile-responsive. This enhanced visual experience played a direct role in driving deeper platform adoption.
Design & Prototyping: Translated complex IA structures into intuitive user flows and high-fidelity wireframes. The resulting solution features three core experience components:
The "Find" Engine: A highly contextual, intelligent search that prioritizes people and expertise over documents.
The "Assist" Hub: A collaboration workspace for quick-launching projects, connecting cohorts, and sharing in-progress work.
The "Connect" Feed: A personalized, visually dynamic dashboard that surfaces relevant conversations, data, and company news.
Impact and Results
The 24-week engagement resulted in the launch of Toyota Connect, providing Toyota employees with a centralized platform that delivered:
Increased Productivity: Reduced the average time spent searching for internal resources by an estimated 30% (based on post-launch metrics).
Enhanced Engagement: The new visual design and personalized dashboard contributed to a measurable increase in daily active users compared to the legacy system.
Cultural Transformation & Adoption: Toyota was so pleased with these efforts, they requested a dedicated sizzle reel to help the Organization Change Management team hero the platform throughout the organization, effectively transforming the organization overnight.
A Unified Brand Presence: Provided a cohesive, premium visual experience that reinforces Toyota's brand identity internally, making work feel more integrated and intentional.
As the UX leader and designer on this project, I successfully translated a complex organizational need into a simple, beautiful, and functional digital solution that fundamentally changed how Toyota employees connect and collaborate.
