Work/BGRS

Relocation,
without the chaos.

A centralized, task-driven dashboard that transforms a fragmented, email-heavy relocation process into a structured, trackable, and collaborative experience — designed inclusively to WCAG AA in partnership with Fable.

BGRS ReloAccess — relocation dashboard with departure milestone, tasks, itinerary, and overall progress

Year

2020

Role

Sr. UX Designer · Lead

Client

BGRS (now SIRVA)

Platform

Enterprise web · responsive

About the client

BGRS (now SIRVA) provides global employee relocation services and software, supporting organizations — including government clients — in managing complex relocation workflows.

Team & partners

Product, engineering, and stakeholder leads at BGRS, with accessibility research and validation in partnership with Fable — testing alongside real users of assistive technology.

Partners & integrations
Overview — 01

Relocation is almost always a tedious and overwhelming process. The BGRS dashboard supports employees, consultants, and clients through every step — coordinating tasks, timelines, and communication across multiple stakeholders. The existing experience was underutilized, hard to navigate, and heavily reliant on email, with users abandoning the platform entirely. The redesign created a centralized, intuitive system that users would actually adopt — shifting relocation management from scattered communication to a structured, self-serve experience.

Screens

12 selected
Summary — 02

The friction we set out to remove.

Key pain points

  • Users abandoning the platform and defaulting to email
  • Poor task visibility and tracking
  • Confusing task classifications — reminders, milestones, system tasks
  • Overwhelming and outdated UI — described as "a static PowerPoint"
  • Lack of centralized communication across stakeholders
  • Accessibility barriers for users on assistive technology
Result: low adoption, missed tasks, and fragmented communication — leading to relocation delays.

The problem

Relocation is a multi-step, high-stress process with many stakeholders, deadlines, and dependencies. Instead of simplifying it, the existing dashboard added confusion, lacked clarity, and failed to become a source of truth. Users resorted to email — and that broke the system entirely.

My role

Lead UX Designer — Research → Strategy → Execution. I led the redesign end-to-end: user interviews, accessibility testing with Fable, UX strategy, and detailed design. I collaborated with product, engineering, and stakeholders to align on priorities, define MVP scope, and ensure usability across a global audience.

Objective

Re-establish the dashboard as the primary workspace for relocation management — increase platform adoption, centralize communication and tasks, simplify task management, and improve accessibility across a global user base.

Instead of asking "How do we improve the dashboard?" — we asked, "How do we make this the one place users actually want to work in?"

BGRS — full-bleed flow overview
Accessibility — 03

Built with real users on assistive tech.

BGRS relocates employees of nearly every demographic, globally — so accessibility wasn't a finish-line check, it was a foundation. We partnered with Fable, who connected us with users of assistive technology — screen readers, voice control, switch devices — to test, learn, and validate the experience as we built it.

Fable Tech Labs
Accessibility research partner

Through Fable, we ran sessions with people who use assistive technology day-to-day. They shared lived experience that no audit can surface: how a screen reader flows through a complex task list, where voice control fails on tightly-packed UI, why our heading hierarchy made a calendar view unnavigable. We took those notes back into design and engineering — and tested again.

The partnership reshaped how I think about accessibility. It's not a constraint to design around — it's a sharper lens that exposes UX problems for everyone.

WCAG AA · designed and validated

What we paid attention to

01Color & contrast across the full UI — including state, focus, and disabled treatments
02Type sizing and minimum hit areas tuned to mobile and assistive input
03Semantic structure — H1 / H2 / H3 hierarchy that screen readers can navigate
04ARIA labels, roles, and live regions for tasks, milestones, and notifications
05Keyboard-first flows for every primary action — tested with switch users
06Voice-control compatibility on dense list and calendar views
WCAG AA validated with real assistive-technology users across 6 device + tool combinations
Features & updates — 04

Three moves that brought
users back from email.

F · 01

Navigation system redesign

Pain point

Users struggled to find key information — the existing structure was flat, inconsistent, and not built around how relocation actually flows.

Solution

Introduced a hybrid navigation model — a top bar for global wayfinding and a side nav for task-based organization — with a clearer hierarchy and screen-reader-friendly heading structure validated with Fable.

↓ Time to find key pages (observed in testing) · ↑ navigation success rate · ↑ user-reported ease of use
A11y · keyboard order & landmarks audited with Fable
After — top + side hybrid navigation
Before — flat navigation with hidden depth
F · 02

Home dashboard redesign

Pain point

The dashboard was cluttered, outdated, and not actionable — users described it as "a static PowerPoint."

Solution

Removed low-value widgets and surfaced the things people actually came back for: tasks, milestones, and itinerary. Introduced a horizontal scroll for milestones and tasks, and let relocating individuals add flight and address details to a printable, emailable itinerary — turning the dashboard into an all-in-one project + trip management tool.

↑ Engagement with dashboard · ↓ cognitive load · ↑ interaction with key modules (tasks, itinerary)
After — redesigned home dashboard with tasks, milestones, and itinerary
Before — original home dashboard with widget overload
F · 03

Calendar & list views

Pain point

Users relied on email, causing fragmented communication and lost information. Multiple task types — reminders, milestones, system tasks — left people confused and unable to track progress, with no visibility into upcoming deadlines.

Solution

Introduced a new calendar view for a high-level overview of the relocation timeline. Unified everything into a simplified to-do list with clear ownership, status, and actions, and enabled task-level commenting directly in the platform — pulling the conversation out of email and back into the workflow.

↑ Task completion · ↓ missed tasks · ↑ visibility into deadlines · ↓ reliance on email · ↑ communication traceability
A11y · calendar tested for screen reader & keyboard nav
Calendar view — relocation timeline overview
Task view — unified to-do list
Task details panel — task detail with comments
01 / 03
BGRS — design system overview
05 · Design & research

A research-driven redesign to recover adoption.

01 — Discovery

User interviews, accessibility testing with Fable, and competitive analysis across the global mobility space.

02 — Synthesis

Identified the core issue: users were abandoning the platform because it lacked clarity and usefulness.

03 — Prototyping

Designed task-driven workflows and simplified UI through wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes.

04 — Validation

Tested with employees, consultants, and assistive-technology users to validate usability and adoption.

Research & discovery

Email had quietly become the product.

Preliminary research, user interviews, and an extensive competitive study showed we were lagging in nearly every dimension. Tasks had multiple confusing classifications — reminders, personal reminders, milestones, system tasks. With Fable, interviews with users on assistive tech surfaced parallel pain points around contrast, structure, and keyboard flow.

Design & prototyping

Built around tasks, not features.

Focused on simplifying task structures, creating one centralized experience, and designing for accessibility from the ground up — not retrofitting it later. WCAG AA was a target from sketch one.

User testing feedback

Clarity, completion, and trust.

Testing showed increased usability and clarity, improved task completion, and a stronger preference for the platform over email. Validation with people with disabilities confirmed the experiences were accessible across screen readers, voice control, and keyboard-only navigation.

Tone & voice

Calm, direct, supportive.

Relocation is stressful. Microcopy was rewritten to feel like a competent guide — never bureaucratic, never apologetic — with clear, descriptive labels that read well aloud as well as on screen.

Wireframes

From sketch to system.

Early wireframes for the dashboard redesign — used to align stakeholders on the new task-driven model before high-fidelity design and assistive-technology testing.

BGRS — FigJam research synthesis
06 · Challenges

Key challenges and solutions.

CH · 01

Driving adoption in a broken system.

The entire UI and UX needed an overhaul. Through preliminary research we identified employees' top goals and rebuilt the experience around them.

→ Rebuilt the experience around tasks and communication to make the platform useful again.
CH · 02

Wide global user base.

BGRS relocates employees of every age, language, and ability. A one-size design didn't fit anyone well.

→ Designed for different ages, languages, and accessibility needs — validated with real users on assistive tech.
CH · 03

Overcomplicated task system.

Reminders, personal reminders, milestones, system tasks — users couldn't tell them apart, let alone act on them.

→ Simplified into a clear, unified task structure with consistent ownership, status, and actions.
CH · 04

Accessibility compliance.

The legacy product couldn't be trusted on assistive technology. We paid close attention to colour, contrast, text sizes, clickable areas, proper semantic coding (H1 / H2 / H3), and ARIA labeling — testing with Fable's assistive-tech users.

→ Designed and tested to WCAG AA standards with real users on screen readers, voice control, and switch devices.
CH · 05

Merging old + new systems.

Some legacy components couldn't be replaced overnight. We had to evolve the experience without breaking the contract with existing users and integrations.

→ Balanced legacy constraints with modern UX improvements, rolling out in phases.
Prototype — 07

Walkthrough of the new flow.

A clickable Figma prototype of the redesigned dashboard — from sign-in through task completion, calendar view, and itinerary export. Recorded as part of stakeholder review and assistive-technology testing rounds.

00:00
02:34

Length

2:34 — narrated walkthrough of the primary flow

Tool

Figma prototype, recorded for stakeholder + Fable review

Covers

Sign-in → home → tasks → calendar → itinerary

08 · Results & impact

What shipped, and what moved.

MVP scope

Four anchors, shipped together.

Simplified task system · home dashboard redesign · list + calendar views · centralized communication. Each piece reinforced the others — adoption, clarity, and trust moved as a system, not as features.

Rollout

Validated through testing + stakeholder feedback.

Phased rollout with Fable accessibility validation gating each release. Stakeholder reviews confirmed measurable improvements in task completion, communication traceability, and platform adoption among employees and consultants.

↑
Platform adoption — users returning from email
↓
Missed tasks & communication gaps
↑
Task completion & visibility
AA
WCAG compliance — validated with Fable
BGRS — full-bleed break
09 · Learnings

What I'm taking with me.

Learning · 01

Adoption is everything.

If users don't use the system, nothing else matters. Every other metric flows from adoption — measure that first, design for it relentlessly.

Learning · 02

Simplicity drives engagement.

Reducing complexity had the biggest single impact on behavior. Cutting task types and consolidating views moved adoption more than any new feature did.

Learning · 03

Accessibility improves UX for everyone.

Designing inclusively benefits all users — not just edge cases. Working with Fable changed how I run sessions, write copy, and review prototypes on every project since.

Learning · 04

Centralization creates trust.

When everything lives in one place — tasks, comments, milestones, itinerary — users rely on it. Trust is earned by reducing the number of tabs they have to keep open.

Next steps

Where this goes.

Expand the dashboard for consultants and clients · further reduce reliance on email workflows · enhance task automation and notifications · continue accessibility validation as new modules ship.