Federated Hermes
2026
10,000 pages, 20 countries, one design system
A post-merger rebuild across 20 countries and 8 languages, with 34% less drop-off.
Overview
Two firms, one inherited mess
Federated Investors and Hermes Investments merged in 2018, and the combined web presence inherited every inconsistency from both. Regional teams in 20+ countries had built their own pages on their own systems, producing different styles, hierarchies, and content structures, plus compliance gaps and accessibility failures that had already drawn ADA litigation.
I led design on the rebuild. We built it around task completion rather than brand storytelling, shipped a global design system and 15 page templates in Optimizely, and launched across 20 countries and 8 languages.
Problem
A reference tool, not a destination
Underneath the brand problem was a usability one. Financial professionals and individual investors weren't coming to browse. They arrived with a specific task, usually finding one data point on one fund. The product pages that mattered most were the densest and hardest to parse, and navigation changed depending on the region you were in.
When the site failed them, they went to a third-party aggregator. The firm lost the relationship and any control over how its own data got presented.
Research
Finding out how people actually arrived
I worked with our researcher on interviews with 30 financial professionals and individual investors, plus 8 internal stakeholders across both legacy brands. We ran a competitor analysis to benchmark IA conventions in the sector and a Hotjar heatmap study of the existing site.
Two findings reset the project. Nearly every user arrived with one question about a single fund's performance or holdings, and those pages had no internal wayfinding. And heatmaps showed most sessions bypassed the homepage entirely, arriving through bookmarks and deep links, which meant page-level structure mattered more than any homepage hierarchy we could design.
Heatmap analysis of existing product pages
Design
A system built for task completion
I designed the full system myself, starting with style tiles to settle the merged visual language and working through atomic design from tokens up to page templates. It shipped as 48 components and 15 templates covering the homepage, About, Insights, Capabilities, and the full fund and product set.
Style tile ideation process
The changes that mattered most were structural. Navigation moved to a simpler IA modeled on conventions people already knew from competitor sites, since familiarity beat distinctiveness for an audience arriving with a task in hand. Long fund pages gained sub-navigation. Because most sessions skipped the homepage, every page was designed to work as an entry point on its own.
Accessibility was built into every component instead of caught at QA, so regional teams could author thousands of pages without introducing compliance issues. I led content migration in the final phase and documented every component and page type in Confluence.
Responsive product page designs
Final design mockups
Outcomes
Key outcomes
Reflection
What the research killed
The most useful thing research did here was kill an assumption. We came in expecting to design a homepage-led brand experience for two merged identities, and the data said almost nobody sees the homepage. People arrive deep, with one question, often from a bookmark they saved years ago.
If I revisited it, I'd push harder on automated accessibility validation inside the authoring flow, and I'd instrument the fund pages from day one to measure time to answer instead of time on page.
