When context goes missing
8 months project
Product Design
Strategy & Roadmap
People Card
As sorting complexity and metadata volume increased, the original People Card began to fall short. This redesign restructured the component to support clearer hierarchy, contextual awareness, and a more accessible and consistent cross-platform experience.
Team
Supervisors
Elliot Mah
Jimmy Foulds
Lost in the metadata
Whether you're looking up someone's role, checking if they're online, or figuring out who reports to who, the People Card does a lot of heavy lifting.
But as we introduced new sorting functionality and more details into the People view, the card started to fall behind. Important metadata wasn’t showing up. Information wrapped awkwardly. And some visual choices made earlier? They weren’t holding up, especially when it came to accessibility.
Here, I saw an opportunity to rethink how a compact card component could scale, shaping a clearer, more trustworthy experience around its context.
Built for better first glances
The new People Card design brings structure to complexity, letting users scan, sort, and understand key details without second-guessing.
The problems we were solving for
On the surface, the People Card works. But under closer inspection, a few key issues kept coming up:
Sort confusion
Cards could be sorted by fields like birthday, pronouns, or location, but the card never told you what it was sorted by. This creates confusion around why someone appeared first or last as users had no clue why Person A was above Person B.
Poor scannability and wrapping issues
Longer metadata, like role titles or emails, often wrapped across lines ambiguously. This made it hard to tell which line belonged to which field. For example, was "Manager" part of "Customer Success" or a separate line? It was already hard to scan, but it was somehow even harder to trust.
Accessibility gaps
Custom badges had no labels. And when they came in all kinds of colors and shapes, people with color blindness or visual impairments had no way to decode them.
So we kicked off a redesign. What started as a simple clean-up quickly sparked a much deeper conversation about hierarchy, visibility, and what makes a small component feel truly trustworthy. It led us to rethink how people find, understand, and connect with others on the platform.
The early directions:
Mild, Mid, & Wild exploration
At the first concept review, I brought two layout options to the table:
Sort confusion
Cards could be sorted by fields like birthday, pronouns, or location, but the card never told you what it was sorted by. This creates confusion around why someone appeared first or last as users had no clue why Person A was above Person B.
Poor scannability and wrapping issues
Longer metadata, like role titles or emails, often wrapped across lines ambiguously. This made it hard to tell which line belonged to which field. For example, was "Manager" part of "Customer Success" or a separate line? It was already hard to scan, but it was somehow even harder to trust.