Consolidating four legacy websites into a single enterprise platform
Micro Focus
Lead UI/UX Designer
Micro Focus
Lead UI/UX Designer
In 2015, I joined DXC as a contract designer placed at Novell. Within a few months, Novell was acquired by Micro Focus — a merger that created the world's largest enterprise software company. Before the merger, Micro Focus and its acquisitions had accumulated four separate websites selling overlapping products to overlapping audiences, each with its own brand, content strategy, and technical foundation. I was brought on as the sole designer to lead the consolidation effort. By the end of the two-year project, I was leading a team of four designers and had helped establish the design language, page templates, and component system that unified the experience.
This case study covers a multi-year UI engagement: research across four existing user bases, layouts across extensive IA and marketing priorities, a component-based system to resolve competing design directions, and the templatized component system that made it possible to launch and maintain a website with thousands of pages.
Before the merger, Novell had been acquired multiple times, and each acquisition had brought along its own product line and corresponding website. By the time Micro Focus came into the picture, four separate marketing sites were competing for attention, confusing customers, and creating duplicated work for content, marketing, and engineering teams. Some products were sold across multiple sites. Content was frequently duplicated. There was site-level navigation that no longer reflected how customers searched for solutions.
The newly merged company also needed a unified brand identity, which meant the website consolidation had to happen alongside a full rebrand — two major projects in parallel, working with thousands of existing pages that needed to be migrated, redesigned, or retired.
How do you merge four established websites — each with its own loyal users, content, and conversion patterns — into a single unified platform without losing what was working on each? And how do you do it while simultaneously rolling out a new brand identity and scaling from one designer to a team of four?
The challenge wasn't just visual consolidation — it was figuring out which features and patterns from each legacy site actually served users, which were holdovers from past acquisitions, and which needed to be reimagined entirely for the merged audience.
Rather than relying on stakeholder opinions about which legacy site performed best, I built a user validation strategy around real user feedback. I designed and ran moderated user research sessions, watching users navigate prototypes to understand which content patterns resonated most. From those respondents, I selected a subset for moderated video sessions, watching users navigate through existing tasks to understand where the existing sites supported their workflow and where they got stuck.
The synthesis from this research drove the feature decisions for the new unified site. When research surfaced clear winners, those patterns became the foundation. When two or three viable directions emerged, I designed variations and ran additional usability tests to identify the strongest option. For decisions where qualitative testing didn't produce a clear answer, we built both versions and resolved the question through A/B testing post launch.
Every problem started in low-fidelity wireframes. With a rebrand happening in parallel, low-fidelity was the only way to evaluate structure and flow without getting tangled up in evolving visual decisions. Wireframes were also easier to walk stakeholders and users through, which kept iteration fast.
Once a wireframe direction was validated, I moved into clickable prototypes so engineering could begin scoping the build in parallel with the continued design work. After usability testing, I produced high-fidelity responsive designs in Sketch and reviewed them closely with the development team — keeping framework constraints in mind so the engineering handoff would be clean.
With thousands of pages in scope, templating was non-negotiable. I built a system of reusable page templates and components that covered the full range of content types on the site. That system allowed the design team to maintain consistency at scale — patterns that were still in use long after the project ended.
Four separate websites were successfully consolidated into a single unified platform under the new Micro Focus brand. The templatized design system became the handoff tool for the 40+ person content migration team, and the cross-functional working patterns we established between design and engineering became the team's default operating model — still in use today, even after most of the original team has moved on.
This project also fundamentally shaped my design practice. Watching the real-world problems with real user feedback taught me that I wanted to go deeper into UX, not just UI. After the project wrapped, I enrolled in General Assembly's UX program to formalize that side of my practice. Looking back, this was the project that taught me how research transforms design from subjective opinion into a defensible strategy — and how the right collaboration patterns between design and engineering can outlast any individual contributor.
