Role: Solo Product Designer
Timeline: September 2024 - January 2025
Team: 1 designer, 3 engineers
Best Buy’s Partner Portal is the operational front door for over 3,000 external partners. It houses critical policies, brand guidelines, tools, and resources that shape how partners operate within Best Buy’s ecosystem.
As the sole product designer, I led a structural redesign of this high-visibility platform—transforming fragmented layouts into a scalable, template-driven system aligned with Best Buy’s refreshed brand. The result was a cohesive, maintainable foundation built to support both daily partner usage and long-term ecosystem growth.
Highlights
Translating a corporate brand refresh into a scalable UI system
Best Buy’s 2024 brand refresh introduced new colors, gradients, and visual direction, but the partner portal had not yet adopted those changes. I translated updated brand guidelines into reusable interface components including headers, navigation patterns, content modules, and callouts. Rather than restyling pages one by one, I built a system that could be applied consistently across the entire site.
Updated typography, grid logic, and gradient system defined as reusable foundations for the refreshed partner experience.
Rebuilding the portal around modular templates
Over time, pages had been created independently across teams, leading to inconsistent layouts and duplicated content. I introduced standardized templates that defined layout structure, spacing, and content groupings. This gave internal teams a clear framework to create and update pages without reinventing patterns each time.
Standardized template structure introduced consistent hierarchy and spacing across pages.
Making the experience usable beyond desktop
The original portal was built primarily for desktop use, even though many partners access it from mobile devices in the field. I redesigned navigation, content stacking, and expandable sections to function predictably across desktop, tablet, and mobile breakpoints. The new structure supports touch interaction and clearer hierarchy on smaller screens.
Responsive redesign ensures core resources are accessible across devices.
Reflection
This project pushed me to think beyond visual updates and focus on structure, scale, and real world usage. As the sole designer responsible for a partner portal used by thousands of external stakeholders, I had to balance brand direction, usability, and long term maintainability without overcomplicating the experience.
The redesign aligned the site with Best Buy’s new visual identity, introduced consistent templates, and made the experience usable across devices for the first time. It reinforced the importance of building systems that hold up over time, especially when hundreds of people rely on them every day.
Certain details and visuals have been generalized to protect proprietary information.