Liberty Mutual Insurance

Context

A decade of content sprawl, and nobody could find anything

myLiberty had grown organically over 10 years: thousands of pages, hundreds of content editors, no shared structure, no placement rules, and no naming standards. Search had become the primary navigation mechanism, and it was absorbing failures the site structure should have prevented. Employee feedback about search was consistently negative.

The trigger was a SharePoint-to-Drupal platform migration. 400+ editors couldn't rebuild their content until a structural foundation existed: the IA had to be in place before any of them could start.

Research approach

Diagnosing the structural problems before designing the solution

Used a mixed-methods approach: IA-specific research methods to surface employee mental models and validate the proposed structure, layered with existing search analytics and support ticket data to diagnose where the current system was already failing employees.

Together, the methods covered different levels of evidence: card sorting shaped the categories, first-click testing tested labels and expectations, tree testing validated whether the structure worked without visual design, and moderated sessions validated proposed structure options while adding qualitative context to the quantitative findings.

Content design

One page per topic, one place to maintain it

Every content page needed a structure: what it contained, how it was organized, who it was for. The central structural decision: manager-only content would live on the same page as all-employee content, not siloed in a separate section of the site.

This was a content governance decision as much as a UX decision: splitting topics by audience made the system harder to navigate, harder to maintain, and easier for content to drift out of sync.

Information architecture

The structural redesign

The redesign produced four top-level categories, each grounded in card sort data showing how employees naturally grouped content and tasks. Each category came with terminology standards and placement rules so 400 editors could rebuild consistently without needing UX sign-off on every decision.

CMS prototyping

Prototyping how 400+ content editors would use Drupal

Reorganizing the employee-facing site was only half the problem. More than 400 content editors needed to rebuild and publish content in Drupal. The CMS had to help them choose the correct site section, identify the intended audience or market, and place each page at the right level of the new information architecture.

I built interactive Axure prototypes for three content-entry models. During a working session, engineering and content teams used them to compare how Drupal could support the new structure, additional audiences, global and local content, and future multilingual requirements. We selected Option 2: editors chose the site section first, then the audience or market, and then the appropriate level of the information architecture.

Navigation design

Mega menu: making the full site structure as navigable as possible

The existing menu surfaced a curated subset of links chosen by content editors. It did not reflect the full site hierarchy, so employees could not use it to move systematically from a broad category to the resource they needed. The challenge was to expose enough structure to make the site navigable without turning the menu into an overwhelming sitemap.

Impact

Outcomes of the IA redesign and mega menu

Breadth of work

Beyond this case study: six years of work on myLiberty

The IA redesign established the structural foundation for the rebuilt platform. Over six years, I worked across nearly every facet of myLiberty as it added new features, content initiatives, accessibility requirements, and global markets.

What this work demonstrates

Systems thinking at organizational scale