Creating Ease Through Consolidation and a Purposeful Design System
Unifying a digital landscape for of the nations largest Protestant churches
Role
Tools
Project Type
Objectives
The Business Problem
Metric Outcomes
Bounce rate reduced by 10%
Returning users increased by 10%
Mobile traffic overtakes for most used format
U-Turn events reduced by 94% within 1 month after launch
Rage click events reduced by 90% within 1 month after launch
Business Goals & Constraints
The Organizational Stakes
PC(USA)'s website was working against the organization’s core mission. The denomination needed its digital presence to unify agency experiences, provide reliable access to resources, and re-establish the site as a meaningful tool for engagement rather than a source of frustration.
The Presbyterian Church set goals to unify all digital experiences and create an accessible, helpful tool that supports their communities. These goals were non-negotiable for the church to best serve in nurturing connections among members and congregations.
What Success Looked Like
Denominational leadership and agency heads defined success as a website that staff could manage, members could use, and that reflected the community it served. The priority was reliability, clarity, and a sense of belonging, rather than innovation.
This required navigating a complex stakeholder landscape. Multiple agency heads represented distinct constituencies and content priorities, making alignment challenging. Achieving a shared definition of success before design began was a key strategic deliverable.
Translating Business Goals into Design Decisions
Brand voice as a design compass. We developed several design directions based on PC(USA)'s desired emotional qualities. This approach gave stakeholders a concrete, non-technical way to evaluate design decisions and ensured feedback remained aligned with organizational intent.
ADA compliance as a constraint that clarified scope. We used WCAG and ADA guidelines as foundational design boundaries, not as a checklist. For an audience spanning generations and digital fluency levels, including ESL users and older congregants, accessibility was essential. It influenced color, type, contrast, and interaction patterns throughout the site.
User personas as the feature filter. We evaluated every feature through the lens of the six validated user groups. Features that did not address a documented user need were excluded. This approach kept the scope manageable and provided a clear rationale for decisions, which was essential when balancing competing stakeholder priorities.
Understanding the Problem
My Role in the Research Phase
Although discovery research was completed before I joined the project, my work was grounded in its findings. I translated research insights into design actions, led UI and concept ideation, developed the feature set, designed the navigation architecture, and managed design decisions through client presentations.
The existing PC(USA) web presence reflected years of organizational growth without a unified design strategy. Content was distributed across six agency sites, each with its own navigation, visual language, and information architecture. The result was a fragmented, visually overwhelming experience that was difficult to maintain and navigate without prior knowledge of the denomination’s structure.
There was no clear information hierarchy. Important resources were buried, and outdated content appeared alongside current material without distinction. Users searching for specific items, such as policy documents or worship resources, found the site more demanding than helpful.
What the Research Revealed
Discovery research with 572 survey respondents and 14 user interviews revealed a consistent issue across all user groups: the site was confusing, exclusive, and unwelcoming. Users rated the site as “unappealing,” “confusing,” and “elite” across nearly every persona.
Frustration was universal, though it manifested differently by group. Congregation and worship leaders struggled to find resources without knowing the responsible agency. Mid council leaders wanted role-based organization rather than an internal org chart. Ministry leaders relied on Google due to unreliable site search. Members found the site corporate rather than faith-centered. Seminarians had difficulty locating ordination guidelines and internships. ESL users encountered limited multilingual content and inconsistent translations.
“It is very difficult to find anything on the website. I get frustrated, and I know what I’m looking for. I can’t imagine what people in the pews think when they go to our websites.”
— Mid Council Member/Leader
The Core Insight
What unified every user group was not a missing feature, but a missing feeling. All users sought efficiency and simplicity. They wanted to find information quickly, without needing insider knowledge of the organization.
The site was built around the denomination’s structure. It needed to be rebuilt around user needs.
This shift in perspective guided every subsequent design decision, from navigation architecture to feature prioritization and content hierarchy. A stakeholder captured this aspiration clearly:
“The website should have a clean, uncluttered look. The visitor of the site should come away feeling they easily found what they were looking for — with nuggets of information they weren’t necessarily looking for. They should come away with the thought that visiting this website was a rewarding experience and they want to revisit the site again and again.”
— Project Stakeholder Survey Response
Design Approach
Designing for Efficiency at Every Touch Point
Research made it clear: users needed less friction, not more features. This principle guided every design decision. Instead of addressing the entire site at once, we prioritized the highest-traffic and most frustrating areas. Three key areas defined our approach.
The Daily Lectionary — Clarity at the Most Visited Page
The Daily Lectionary is among the most visited pages. For congregation and worship leaders, it serves as a weekly touchpoint, but the previous design made this routine task unnecessarily difficult.
The design decision here was structural: a combination of calendar and tabular layouts to give users two intuitive ways to access content. Whether users preferred dates or scripture sequence, the page accommodated both. The visual design emphasized generous whitespace, high legibility, and minimal distractions. For a frequently visited page, the goal was to facilitate use rather than impress on first visit.at content was missing — it was that users couldn’t surface what they needed. Research showed users across every group defaulting to Google rather than the site’s own tools. That’s a signal not just of poor search, but of broken trust.
Resources — What you need and how you think to find it
We redesigned the Resources section with smart search and card-based results to support users with lower reading fluency and ESL users who benefit from visual, scannable content. Preset filters provided starting points without requiring precise queries. The cards allowed users to preview content before downloading, addressing a major pain point identified in research.
Site-Wide Search — Flexible by Design
With content ranging from news articles to PDFs, worship resources, and policy documents, the site required a search tool capable of managing complexity without burdening the user.
We built a comprehensive search experience with multiple views and a preset-filtered view for users and an open search view for power users who know what they’re after. This wasn’t a single solution imposed on everyone. It was a flexible system designed to meet different users at their level of familiarity, from a first-time visitor to a mid council leader who visits multiple times a week.
We are also proud to say we submitted our designs to the Web Excellence awards and were awarded best in Navigation and Search for season 15.
The Solution
A Site Built Around People, Not Structure
The final solution was not a traditional redesign, but a consolidation. Instead of six fragmented agency sites requiring users to navigate the internal org chart, the new pcusa.org offered a unified experience organized around user needs.
Every UI decision traced back to the same principle established in research: reduce friction, build trust, and make the experience feel as welcoming as the community it represents.
Navigation — Award-Winning Architecture
Navigation was a strategically significant and highly recognized deliverable. In partnership with the Administrative Services Group (ASG) and key stakeholders, we designed an information architecture that removed agency boundaries and introduced user-role-based pathways.
For the first time, worship leaders, mid council members, and first-time visitors could all arrive at the homepage and immediately find relevant paths. The navigation not only looked cleaner but also reflected a shift to an outward-facing digital presence.
Multilingual Support — Inclusion as Infrastructure
For ESL users — the most underserved group identified in research — language access had been a critical gap. Hispanic congregants found sparse resources on the Spanish site. Korean users maintained an entirely separate site for engagement. Both groups were effectively excluded from the full richness of what PC(USA) offered digitally.
The new platform launched with full multilingual support across English, Spanish, and Korean — treating inclusion not as an add-on feature but as a structural requirement of the system. This decision directly addressed one of the organization’s core goals: a website that served the full breadth of its membership, not just its most digitally comfortable users.
The Unified Experience
Taken together, the solution answered the original business problem point by point. Fragmentation was resolved through unified architecture. Inaccessibility was addressed through ADA-compliant design, multilingual support, and a navigation built for all literacy levels. And the feeling of the site, once rated as cold, elite, and exclusive by users across every persona, was redesigned to feel approachable, clear, and genuinely useful.
The work earned recognition for its navigation design. More importantly, users came back.