A six-month redesign of Advisory.com, the news arm of UnitedHealth Group's healthcare intelligence business. Consolidated 30+ AEM templates into 11, remapped 70+ components, and gave a publishing team back the tool they needed to actually tell stories.
Advisory.com is the editorial voice of Advisory Board, UnitedHealth Group's healthcare intelligence business. It exists to tell the stories that move healthcare decisions — research, events, training, briefings.
But the publishing team had a problem: every story they wanted to tell had to fit a template that was designed for a different story. The site had grown to 30+ AEM templates and 100+ components, with no clear logic for which to use when. Authoring a single article became a guessing game.
UHG asked us to revamp the operating model. What we found was that the operating model wasn't the problem — the system underneath it was.
We ran 18 stakeholder interviews across the editorial, marketing, and engineering teams to understand where the friction actually lived. The complaints sounded different on the surface — slow page builds, inconsistent design, weak search, hard-to-scan layouts — but they all traced back to the same root.
The system had been built to anticipate every possible content combination through static templates. Each new edge case got a new template. Over time, the templates outpaced the team that had to use them.
Stakeholder interviews across editorial, marketing, and engineering
AEM templates audited, most with only minor variations from each other
Components in inventory with no clear pattern of which to use when
Excerpt from the findings deck presented back to UHG leadership.
The interviews surfaced friction at three distinct layers — design, usability, and content. Each layer compounded the others. A wall of text from a rigid grid was harder to publish, harder to scan, and impossible to search well.
30+ templates and 100+ components made page building time-consuming and confusing for authors.
— Internal stakeholder interview
We grouped the 30+ existing templates by their underlying layout structure and consolidated down to 11 future-state templates. Then we mapped the 70+ components against those 11 templates, giving authors a clear, flexible system instead of a deep menu of near-duplicates.
Before we could consolidate, we had to make the sprawl legible. We mapped every template against every component, then grouped templates by structural similarity. The map became the artifact that aligned the design team, the dev team, and the client around what was actually being built.
Template map — overview of all 30+ templates grouped by layout structure.
Component mapping — 70+ components remapped against the consolidated 11 templates.
Every decision in this project had to answer one question: does this make the publishing team's life easier without sacrificing the reader's experience? If the answer wasn't both, it didn't ship.
The original templates were organized by what kind of content lived in them — events, briefings, research, etc. We regrouped by structural similarity instead, which let one flexible template serve multiple content types.
Required the editorial team to think about content as flexible blocks rather than fixed page types — a conceptual shift, not just a UI one.
The legacy three-column grid was the source of nearly every “wall of text” complaint. A wider, more variable layout let images, callouts, and longform research breathe — and made pages scannable for the first time.
Marketing surfaces in the right rail had to be re-evaluated and reconsolidated, since the rail no longer existed by default.
The most commercially valuable content was getting the least exposure. New surfacing patterns gave editors deliberate places to promote events and research at moments that matched the reader's journey.
Required defining a content priority hierarchy with the editorial team — a conversation that hadn't happened before this project.
Midway through, it became clear the client's main stakeholder wanted a redesign, while the dev team had been scoped for a lift-and-shift. The two were on a collision course. We led joint working sessions to surface the misalignment, document the actual scope both sides could commit to, and reset the design direction with the broader client team in the room.
Cost a sprint of momentum to re-align. Saved the project from shipping something half the client team wouldn't sign off on.
The redesigned system in context — a flexible canvas for the editorial team, a scannable experience for the reader.
The flexible content-first layout in production. Wider type measure, intentional imagery, and clear pathways to related research and events.
Components from the remapped library, assembled into a real article. Same building blocks, different stories, no custom dev required.
A six-month engagement that left UHG with a leaner system, an aligned team, and a publishing operation that could finally keep up with the editorial calendar.
AEM templates consolidated. Clear logic for which to use when.
Components remapped to the new template system for reuse and consistency.
Stakeholder interviews, surfacing the patterns under the noise.
Realigned a divided client team mid-project so a shippable scope could land.
Hindsight on a six-month enterprise engagement.