TEAM
1 Engineer
1 Engineering Manager
1 Designer (me)
MY ROLE
User Research
Competitive Analysis
UX Design
How do we communicate the Insight brand across teams at Apple?
The Insight team had established a strong internal brand and the current website communicated it well. However, with rapid product and user growth, we needed to think about how to express our brand externally across teams at Apple and redesign the website to address a broader audience.
The original Insight website, beautifully designed by Chad Crabtree.
Understanding a brand
Based on Harvard Business Review's brand framework, a brand consists of 9 interrelated components (internal, external, or both).
Our existing site effectively communicated internal brand elements, but lacked external brand elements.
Our existing website communicated our internal brand, but lacked an external brand.
As Insight's visibility and user base grew, we needed to develop its external brand to communicate our value proposition, relationships with teams at Apple, and our position company-wide.
The matrix showed us that what we needed to focus on next was our external brand.
Finding focus areas for external brand development through user feedback
Within the past few years, we noticed a couple of trends. First, there was a lack of self-service. Product managers would field same questions like, “What tool should I use based on [ABC] use case?” Or “Is [XYZ] data type supported in your products?”
Second, there was a knowledge gap. The Insight team spent many hours to train and onboard new teams, but even some of our existing teams were unaware of product capabilities.
Finally, information was scattered. Over the years, Insight had released multiple features and products, but this information was dispersed across different product sites and multiple emails.
Information such as release emails, newsletters, support pages & documentation was everywhere.
The user feedback revealed three focus areas:
Lack of self-service: Product managers often fielded the same questions
Knowledge gaps: Teams were unaware of product capabilities
Scattered information: Product updates, documentation, and resources were scattered across multiple channels
Summary of our research findings
Defining our position through a clear mission statement
Through collaborative meetings with product and leadership teams, we also aligned on a clear mission statement that reflected our core competency and goal: "Connecting teams through manufacturing data."
This mission statement became the inspiration for what we wanted to communicate through the Insight website.
Through collaborative meetings, we got alignment on the mission statement from both product and leadership.
Explaining the value prop of our products, rather than an information dump
Finally, a big challenge was: How do we explain the entire Insight platform—six products serving 14 diverse teams with more than 27,000 users—without overwhelming them with information?
In addition, the teams who used Insight were diverse and had use cases ranging from manufacturing, supply chain, hardware engineering, test engineering, fraud, and security.
The challenge was explaining the entire Insight platform without giving users a dump of information.
Translating user feedback, our mission statement, and challenges into a design
Problem 1: Product managers fielded the same questions repeatedly —> Idea: Self-service product discovery
Problem 2: Teams unaware of product capabilities —> Idea: Shared use cases and success stories
Problem 3: Information scattered across multiple channels —> Idea: Centralized resource and article hub
Problem-to-solution mapping
Design process
My design process included:
Theme exploration with brand keywords
Competitive analysis of internal and external marketing sites
AI-assisted visual exploration of themes and concepts
Theme exploration
Then I also did a theme exploration with some keywords that reflected the Insight brand. Then I found stock images that visually represented these keywords, which helped with the visual inspiration of the page.
Theme exploration and visual inspiration using stock images.
Competitive analysis
I also conducted competitive analysis on both internal and external marketing pages. This helped to get ideas on how other teams or companies laid out their products and features.
Conducted competitive analysis across both internal and external products.
Visual exploration using AI
I also did a visual exploration of the things we wanted to highlight about the Insight platform. For example, we collected a huge scale of data and supported many data types and use cases. Manufacturing data was what connected all of our products.
I started out with creating generic AI images just for visual exploration. Then, I liked the factory line illustration so I created my own of a line of iPhones on a line, with a computer connected to it. Finally, I fed this illustration into AI and created some unique illustrations.
I created AI images of aspects of Insight that I wanted to highlight. Then I iterated on those visuals through custom illustrations.
Wireframing & Testing
I progressed from wireframes to high-fidelity mockups, with multiple iterations based on feedback from users, the design & product team, and leadership.
Started with low-fidelity wireframes then moved onto higher-fidelity mockups.
Final designs
Home page
Features the mission statement prominently: "Connecting teams through manufacturing data."
Users can self-service tools by asking themselves the question: “What insight product is right for me?” or "What kind of data is available?"
Products are categorized first by use case (Monitor, Analyze, and Collect) and then data types.
Products are categorized by use cases and data types.
Clicking on a data type card gives more details.
Navigation & Search
Clicking on the 'Product' tab in the navigation allows users to see the full list of products that Insight offers. Users can also do a general keyword search across Insight's product pages and community articles.
Click on navigation to see full list of products.
General search across product pages and community articles.
Search interaction
Product pages
Each product page has a clear product overview with sections for: Data Types, Features, Use Cases.
Product page broken down by data type and features. Documentation is easily accessible.
The 'Use Cases' section spotlights success stories from teams who are using our products.
'Use Cases' section featuring different teams' use cases.
The documentation and release notes are integrated within each product page, so it is easily accessible.
Documentation pages
Release notes pages
Community page
The 'Community' page centralizes all resources, including newsletters, product announcements, tutorials, and tips.
Community page houses newsletters and product release announcements.
Searching for articles within the Community page.
Article detail view. Future concept: AI-summarized content.
Lessons in content-driven design
A key takeaway from this project was the importance of designing around real content.
Initially, I used placeholder text, but I quickly realized that I needed real copy to test whether the layouts and designs worked. To write the copy though, I needed a deeper understanding of each products and how they fit together.
Wrote real copy to test whether layouts (like product cards) worked & made sense.
To maintain consistency across the site, I built reusable components—such as feature and data type cards—with simple gradients and icons. This approach allowed flexibility for different product pages while preserving a cohesive look and feel.
Created multiple types of card components with simple gradients and icons for consistency and flexibility.
I also focused on enabling users to easily create and edit community content. I created header and graphic card components so users could generate polished pages with minimal input (e.g. uploading a team logo and choosing a color or gradient). I also explored AI-generated illustrations as a fast way to produce supporting visuals.
Designed templates of header and graphic components so that users can generate polished pages with minimal input.
