Knowledge Portal: A Smarter Way to Navigate Information
Morgan Stanley aimed to create a centralized platform—a DX Portal—to organize documentation, tools, communities, and company processes in one streamlined system. This initiative prioritized brand alignment, usability, and accessibility, ensuring intuitive experiences for users navigating extensive company resources. The project required a structured design approach, incorporating established UX patterns familiar to the developer community while ensuring consistency across platforms and devices.
Design Work Needed
Morgan Stanley’s internal documentation and resource platforms were fragmented, making it difficult for users to locate, navigate, and interact with essential content. The existing system lacked consistency in branding and accessibility, impacting usability and engagement. The organization needed a scalable design solution to centralize information and improve searchability, navigation, and content discovery.
This project focused on:
- Applying visual design and branding to wireframes with accessibility considerations.
- Organizing the company’s vast knowledge base through structured IA improvements.
- Enhancing search functionality for intuitive recommendations and filtering.
- Developing scalable templates for documentation, diagrams, and technical assets.
Process for the Work
As the Visual Designer, I applied branding, accessibility considerations, and UX refinements to existing wireframes, ensuring clarity and usability across platforms. This effort resulted in 17 designed screens, including light/dark theming and mobile adaptations.
Key Phases and Actions Taken:
- Information Architecture Optimization: Restructured documentation and resources, ensuring logical hierarchy and repeatable page patterns.
- Tagging & Content Cross-Population: Implemented a tagging system to enable seamless information retrieval and reduce duplicative efforts.
- Enhanced Search Experience: Introduced recommendations, type-ahead assistance, and improved filtering to refine search results.
- Interactive Documentation Pages: Included visual examples, code samples, anchor links, and related content to streamline knowledge discovery.
- Community Engagement Enhancements: Built tools for discussions, comment sharing, liking, and article recommendations to foster knowledge-sharing and collaboration.
Designed Solution
The completed DX Portal delivered a structured, branded, and highly accessible experience that centralized Morgan Stanley’s documentation efforts while introducing intuitive patterns familiar to the developer community.
Key impact areas:
- Improved navigation and search capabilities—making knowledge access seamless and efficient.
- Scalable design system—empowering ongoing enhancements with clear guidance for future development.
- Stronger community integration—connecting users through shared discussions, articles, and company event updates.
Valuable Learnings
This project reinforced the importance of strong IA foundations, repeatable UI patterns, and accessibility-first design for documentation platforms. Implementing familiar UX structures from the developer space helps enhance usability and adoption.
There is more story to the work collaboration with this client. Get in touch with me for more details about the process and the outcomes.