City Harvest

The very truck that visits my neighborhood in Bedstuy every Tuesday :D

Why a redesign? — Fragmented communications & resource sharing pipeline

In 2021, City Harvest published its organization-wide SharePoint intranet with the hope that resource sharing would be centralized. However, the original design does not support this well.

State of the portal in Feb 2025

Project goals

• Improve navigation — Refine navigation so employees can locate essential information regardless of portal familiarity.
• Streamline communication — Improve internal content management experience to reduce inaccurate information.
• Increase adoption — Improve content and layout design to increase engagement and confidence in portal exploration.

How might I reorganize information on the portal to increase communication efficiency for Harvesters?

Solution highlights

An easy-to-skim portal and a scalable mini design system.

Home page with reorganized information architecture

Department templates

Stakeholder interviews & portal audit — Gauging company culture and working habits

My main research goal was to understand what common experiences employees had across the organization to maximize the impact of the design recommendations.

Key Insights

• Inconsistent information architecture frustrates employees for non-regular tasks.
• Employees feel disoriented due to lack of standardized departmental pages.
• Outdated and inaccurate documents across the portal lead to employees completing tasks incorrectly.

33% of user interviewees noticed outdated documents as they were showing us the SharePoint.

Refined HMW opportunities

• How might I rethink information architecture to better accommodate seeking unknown items?
• How might I adapt a standardized template for different department needs?
• How might I use design to help clean up the portal efficiently?

IA Explorations — Regrouping different types of documents

The portal had little intentional organization or information hierarchy. After testing with Harvesters, categories such as ‘Personal Access’ and ‘Forms & Services’ emerged as guidance for better skimming experience.

Primary screen space reconsideration

Harvesters access information divergently instead of convergently — they search for documents directly instead of finding them through departments. Having departments as a dropdown saves more primary screen space for direct access to key resources.

Rebranded buttons with more interactivity

Since buttons/folders were the main functionalities of the site, I developed a new set of buttons that adheres to the City Harvest marketing brand guidelines to bring consistency and interactivity to the portal.

• Original buttons (plain, no brand alignment)
• Iteration 1 — simplified typography and darker color for accessibility
• Iteration 2 — added shadow and hover interaction
• Iteration 3 — changed button labels to be less ambiguous
• Final version — used function colors (not brand color) and added icons for skimmability

Explorations for carousel design

Towards the end of the contract, I refined the carousel to be essential but not intrusive to Harvesters. I chose the final option as it looks like a physical calendar and deprioritizes images so it doesn't take lots of mental space, while still hinting at the social element.

Finally — emojis for sense of community

City Harvest is such a warm and competent community that always pushes and encourages each other to do impactful and meaningful work. As a final touch, I translated that dynamic from real-life into the portal by sprinkling in emojis that can be customized by each employee.