Johnson & Johnson - Unified Finance Workspace (Enterprise B2B)
Internal B2B product under NDA. Process, methods, and outcomes shown; specific workflows and visuals abstracted for portfolio purposes.
Context & Problem
My Role
I led the redesign as UX Lead alongside another senior UX partner, working in close collaboration with the finance team over roughly a year. This meant designing not just an interface, but a system that correctly reflected varying access permissions in what a given user could see and act on.
Research & Discovery
This was the most research-intensive project of my time at J&J: stakeholder workshops, concept testing, usability interviews, card sorting, and a full information architecture exercise. That depth was necessary because the core challenge wasn't visual, it was structural — figuring out how calendar, resources, reports, and notifications should relate to each other, and how that relationship needed to change depending on a user's access level.
Key Decision: One View, Access-Aware
Rather than replicate the existing scattered views inside a nicer interface, we consolidated four core areas into a single workspace, with the IA shaped directly by the card-sorting and workshop findings rather than by how the underlying systems happened to be organized. Access permissions were built into each area itself, so what a user saw was automatically scoped to what they were meant to see and act on — removing the manual cross-referencing that used to sit on the user. The pattern proved general enough that we later adapted it for a second team facing the same fragmentation problem.
Calendar
Calendar access was a particular priority for finance users, so rather than a single generic view, we built multiple calendar views with flexible filtering — consolidating a capability that had previously lived elsewhere directly into the workspace.
Related Reports
Reports were reorganized on the page by business department rather than by system or report type, so users could find what was relevant to their actual work instead of navigating a structure that reflected backend organization rather than how people actually thought about their day.
Resources
Resource visibility followed the same department-aware principle as the rest of the workspace — scoped automatically to what a given role was meant to see, rather than requiring a separate request or lookup process.
Notifications
Notifications surfaced time-sensitive items — approvals, updates, upcoming deadlines — directly in the workspace rather than through separate email threads or manual check-ins, keeping the same "system carries the context" principle applied everywhere else.
Tradeoffs
Reconciled the calendar, reports, resources, and notifications into one visual system despite each source coming in a different format — the extra time spent on consistency was worth it, since a workspace that looked stitched-together would have undermined the "single source of truth" premise.
Pushed back on requests to surface more on the page, because cramming in everything technically available would have recreated the same fragmentation problem inside one screen instead of four.
Built the structure to be reusable across teams rather than tailored to one group alone, trading some extra rigor upfront for a pattern that could extend elsewhere — which is exactly what happened afterward.
Results & Impact
Eliminated the need for manual cross-checking across separate views — calendar, resources, reports, and notifications updated automatically rather than requiring users to maintain them by hand
Flexible calendar views and department-based report organization removed two of the most consistent friction points raised in research
Reduced day-to-day friction for finance team members, replacing multiple disconnected tools with a single central workspace
Well-received enough that the underlying pattern was adapted for a second team facing the same fragmentation problem
