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Redesigning the Digital Family Office Experience

A multi-generational family office engaged our team to modernize its client-facing digital experience while migrating from HubSpot to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Though, the initial request was a direct technical “lift and shift,” it immediately became clear that the existing experience no longer reflected the institution’s identity, values, or evolving operational needs. As Creative Director and Engagement Lead, I guided the branding, UX, and UI strategy, partnering closely with stakeholders and engineering leadership to deliver a modernized, intuitive platform anchored in AEM’s capabilities.

This engagement required sensitivity to family dynamics, a nuanced approach to privacy and trust, and the ability to translate a legacy experience into a future-ready design ecosystem without losing what made the institution unique.

The Challenge

Although framed as a functional replatforming effort, the underlying challenges were far more substantial. The existing site was visually dated, constrained by rigid HubSpot templates, and lacked a clear content structure, resulting in redundant pages, unintuitive navigation, and difficulty locating information. Many key materials were managed manually through PowerPoint and PDF exports, making updates slow and error-prone and limiting responsiveness or interactivity.

Complicating matters further, the brand expression did not reflect the warmth, heritage, or professionalism of a long-standing family institution. The experience felt generic rather than personal. Privacy was another critical concern; the platform needed to make family members feel confident that sensitive information was handled discreetly and could not be inadvertently exposed. And while the client initially requested a one-to-one migration of their current experience, it was clear that a surface-level update would not address deeper issues around usability, trust, scalability, and long-term maintainability.

Approach & Strategy

Our strategy began with reframing the engagement: Rather than simply replicating the existing experience in AEM, we sought to create a modern platform that reflected the institution’s values and took advantage of AEM’s authoring, management, and extensibility features.

Starting with a verbal excercise leading into moodboards enabled client stakeholders to see how design decisions reflected different aspects of the brand.

We started with a focused branding exercise designed to engage the client in articulating the character and tone of the family office. Beginning with the institution’s core attributes, we developed a word cloud that captured broader themes, then distilled those themes into two conceptual directions supported by mood boards. To make the creative decisions tangible, each mood board included sample components and screens that showed how the aesthetic direction would translate into the digital experience. Through iterative working sessions, we refined the direction into a visual system that balanced modernity with the warmth and legacy that the family valued.

The brand exercise resulted in a set of components that propelled subsequent UI design.

With the creative direction established, we moved into sprint-based UX/UI delivery, sequencing designs according to development timelines and identifying shared templates to streamline both design and engineering work. We revisited the information architecture to eliminate redundant content, create a more intuitive taxonomy, and introduce clearer navigation paths tailored to how family members and staff actually used the platform.

By playing to the strengths of AEM, the team was able to focus design and customization efforts strategically where they would have the most meaningful impact for the client.

We looked for opportunities throughout to demonstrate the advantages of migrating to AEM. One notable example was the redesigned family tree: previously a static PDF maintained in PowerPoint and updated manually, it was difficult to parse, impossible to interact with, and time-consuming to revise. Our team developed a conceptual redesign that introduced a dynamic, responsive family tree with interactive exploration and significantly simplified updates. Though out of scope for initial build, this concept became a cornerstone for client excitement, showing how AEM could meaningfully enhance both the user experience and internal operations.

Privacy guided every decision. We considered how content was grouped, what was revealed by default, and how interactions could be designed to minimize accidental exposure. This ensured the experience felt trustworthy without becoming restrictive or difficult to navigate.

Execution

Pages were prioritized in collaboration with the tech team based on complexity and template reuse.

The team operated in agile, sprint-based cycles, coordinating closely with development to deliver staged design handoffs aligned with engineering sequencing. Early sprints focused on brand definition and visual direction, while subsequent sprints tackled prioritized screens, components, and design system elements.

The resulting design system provided the flexibility needed to enable a variety of content across templates.

I led regular working sessions with the client to review progress, gather feedback, and ensure alignment between design aspirations and operational realities. Collaboration with the development team ensured that the component library, templates, and content relationships were designed with both immediate delivery and longer-term maintainability in mind. The process emphasized clarity, speed, and cohesion across design artifacts, with the creative team looking ahead to identify dependencies or areas where proactive design work could accelerate engineering progress.

Although the core deliverables focused on migration and modernization, the team’s above-and-beyond explorations helped show the client what a more future-forward platform could achieve.

Outcomes & Impact

The redesigned platform was met with strong enthusiasm from family users, who appreciated the modernized aesthetic, clearer navigation, and more intuitive overall experience. Engagement increased as the new design made content easier to access and understand. The restructured taxonomy and improved AEM component framework reduced content-update time significantly and created a more scalable foundation for future enhancements.

Beyond measurable improvements to usability and operational efficiency, the project strengthened the client relationship. The care taken in translating family values into the design, combined with our demonstration of what AEM could enable, built trust and credibility. This led to continued collaboration, additional enhancement requests, and an extended roadmap of experience improvements that grew beyond the original scope.

Orchestrating Multi-Channel Creative Delivery