Context
Intel's knowledge base had 50,000+ support articles written by hundreds of authors across different product lines over 15+ years. The content was solid, genuinely helpful technical information. The problem was every team had customized the article template to fit their needs. This created a visual and structural mess.
Role & Scope
Role: Senior Product Designer, Design Systems Lead for Digital Experiences at Intel
Platform: Web (responsive), knowledge base across Intel.com
Collaboration: Content teams across product lines, engineering, localization
I owned the template design and system architecture. But I spent more time building consensus than pushing pixels. The challenge was convincing dozens of content teams to give up their customizations and adopt a standard.
Design Constraints
Every team had different needs: Some teams added custom alert boxes in different colors. Others created their own heading styles. Desktop CPU support used different formatting than server documentation. Graphics card articles had different layouts than chipset articles.
Cognitive load exhausted users: Each article looked and behaved differently. Users had to reorient themselves to a new layout every time they clicked a link. Data showed users spent 4.2 minutes reading articles that should have taken 90 seconds.
Authors had no guidance: Creating a new article meant either copying an existing one, perpetuating inconsistency or building from scratch, wasting time. New writers had no formatting standards.
Localization teams struggled: Translating dozens of different layouts into 12 languages created massive overhead. Every custom template multiplied the localization work.
My Approach
Action-Driven Discovery
Each team had unique needs. Charts, downloads, long guides. I pushed back on endless variations and created a single, modular template that worked for 80% of cases. When requirements were legitimate, I solved them through scalable components instead of custom layouts.
Designed for Constraints, Not Perfection
Balanced engineering's need for simplicity with content teams' desire for freedom. Made the system more opinionated with clear hierarchy, consistent spacing and standardized modules. The result was flexible where it mattered, consistent where it counted.
Hidden Salesforce Dependency
Midway through, I discovered 40% of articles were auto-generated from Salesforce data. Created two visually consistent templates. One modular for authored content, one structured for automated content. The experience stayed seamless across both systems.
Readability and Accessibility Raised the Bar
Readability testing proved Intel's default typography struggled for long technical content. I negotiated spacing and line-height exceptions. Addressed 40+ accessibility issues that ultimately improved clarity, hierarchy and authoring consistency for everyone.
Adoption Proved the System Worked
Launched with 200 pilot articles. Users found answers faster, bounce rates dropped and localization teams became champions. Six months later, 85% of new articles used the new template with migration of 50,000 legacy articles underway.
Detailed Results
35% reduction in time-on-page, users finding answers faster through improved scanability.
20% decrease in content authoring time according to content operations surveys.
99 Lighthouse accessibility score, 100 Best Practices score, 92 SEO score.
85% adoption rate for new articles within six months of launch.
50,000+ articles deployed using the unified template (migration ongoing).
Reduced localization costs by eliminating dozens of template variations to translate.
Became the standard for all Intel technical documentation, not just support articles.
Some legacy articles haven't been migrated yet. Content teams prioritize new content over updating old articles, a resource constraint, not a design problem.
Key Takeaways for the Future
Designing at scale means designing for adoption, not just usability. The template could have been perfect, but if content authors refused to use it, it would fail. Half my job was change management. Understanding why teams customized their articles, respecting their needs and showing them how the new system could work better.
Constraints aren't the enemy of good design, they're the foundation. By being opinionated about structure, typography and components, we created consistency that paradoxically gave authors more freedom. They could focus on content instead of formatting decisions.
Users don't care about your design system. They care about finding answers. The template succeeded not because it was beautiful, though it was, but because it made 50,000 articles feel like one coherent knowledge base instead of 50,000 individual documents.
Design systems are only valuable if they serve the people who use them. Both the end users reading articles and the authors creating them. This project worked because we optimized for both.
When systems break, teams slow down.
I work across UX, architecture and content to prevent fragmentation and help organizations move faster with confidence.