Some products are not meant to be public-facing, but they still shape how people feel at work. BNED Connect was built as the first version of an internal employee platform for Barnes & Noble Education, giving employees one place to find company news, events, team information, manager details, employee highlights, directories and leadership updates. The challenge was creating a clear foundation for a product that did not exist before. I worked on the project for 9 months while at Afternow, helping organize many different types of internal content without making the platform feel heavy, confusing or too much like a basic company intranet.

My work covered the design direction, core interface patterns, design system and components for the first release. What made the work interesting was giving an internal tool the same level of care as a customer-facing product, making it feel more polished, useful and connected to the people using it.