Transforming Connact.it from a static showcase into a dynamic digital ecosystem for companies and institutions.
As a product designer, I recognized that Connact.it, a platform for progressive political mediation, suffered from an interface that flattened its inherent complexity. The site didn’t have a content problem; it had a severe relevance problem.
Users were taking over 60 seconds just to grasp the core value proposition. My strategic objective was to completely overhaul content discovery, elevating the platform from a passive showcase into an essential daily work portal.
The challenge: from showcase to daily tool
The core challenge was to completely overhaul content discovery, elevating the platform from a passive showcase into an essential daily work portal. Specifically, the UX intervention was designed to achieve three clear goals for any user landing on the site:
- Brand comprehension: instantly communicate what Connact is and its unique value proposition, drastically reducing the time to understand.
- Content discovery: allow users to effortlessly filter and find relevant events, editorial pieces, and strategic topics based on their specific needs.
- Conversion & engagement: create clear, frictionless pathways for users to subscribe, become partners, or delve deeper into policy issues. Ultimately, the redesign aimed to maximize findability and the overall clarity of the offering.
The problem: chronological silos & cognitive friction
During my initial deep-dive UX audit, I pinpointed three major structural criticalities that were sabotaging the user experience:
- Rapid obsolescence: navigation was arbitrarily structured by years (2024, 2025), forcing users to dig through an “archive” of past events rather than intuitive thematic hubs.
- Thematic dispersion: transversal topics like “mobility” were fragmented across multiple years, destroying any chance of a holistic view of the platform’s real value.
- Audience friction: presenting the exact same data to a corporate executive and a political institution created immediate, high-bounce friction.
Competitor benchmarking
To elevate the platform to international best-in-class standards, I led a strategic analysis of how leading global think tanks manage digital complexity:
- The European House – Ambrosetti: they excel at presenting a clear offering; they don’t just sell events, they curate a “permanent discussion platform”. I knew we needed to emulate this by clearly distinguishing the active role of a “promoter” from a regular participant.
- ISPI & Chatham House: these institutions are benchmark leaders in audience segmentation. They define membership tiers seamlessly. This highlighted the necessity for me to design a transparent comparative table of partnership levels to justify corporate investments
- Bruegel: they successfully transform events into persistent knowledge hubs. By facilitating the download of offline-optimized policy briefs, they encourage idea dispersion—a model I adopted to push Connact beyond simple press releases.
Leveraging this benchmark, I mapped the current user experience against global best practices, identifying the exact strategic gaps I needed to bridge:
| UX dimension | Connact (as-is) | Best practice (competitors) | My strategic intervention |
| Navigation | Chronological (events 2024-26) | Thematic (topics / regions) | Engineered a scalable matrix architecture (theme × time). |
| Membership | Generic contact form | Tiered levels (Silver / Gold) | Designed a “membership options” page with conversion-driven benefits. |
| Content | Segregated in “press area” | Integrated into the user journey | Orchestrated seamless cross-linking between events, reports, and speakers. |
| Access | Generic login | Personalized dashboard | Conceptualized “MyConnact” to offer exclusive reserved content. |
Understanding the friction: user journeys
Mapping the current experience revealed critical pain points for both of our primary target audiences, which I used to drive my design rationale:
1. The corporate persona (the strategic navigator)
- Goal: immediate ROI and high-level networking.
- The friction: they need an executive summary in 30 seconds. Currently, they struggle to find who the other partners are (encountering empty logo placeholders), which severely damages perceived authority. Without knowing who is attending, they simply won’t convert.
- My UX solution: “fast track” navigation, visual summaries, clear participant lists, and a dedicated confidential document area.
2. The institutional persona (the overloaded legislator)
- Goal: shaping political agendas and finding clear positionings on specific topics.
- The friction: they receive hundreds of reports daily and cannot read 100-page documents on a screen. They currently get lost among promotional press releases when searching for synthesis documents like policy briefs.
- My UX solution: a semantic search engine and a “policy & research” hub structurally organized by legislative themes with highlighted “key takeaways”.
The solution: the “dual view system”
To solve the relevance issue without duplicating the platform’s backend, I engineered a global toggle switch in the header (“Are you a company?” / “Are you an institution?”).
- Semantic color coding: I applied strategic color coding to subconsciously guide the user: amber for business and cyan for institutions, instantly adapting the cognitive environment to their needs.
Rethinking the information architecture
I completely dismantled the chronological logic, shifting the architecture to a robust, context-aware matrix. I decided to keep the 5 core navigation items (Themes, Intelligence, Network, Membership, Agenda) as they represent Connact’s business pillars, but I drastically changed their internal value to reduce information overload.
To make the architecture context-aware, the pages now dynamically adapt: for example, if the user is a company, the “Agenda” page will highlight call for tenders and deadlines; if the user is an institution, it will highlight their own events to promote.
Here is how I mapped the structural transition:
| Current page (As-Is) | Proposed architecture (To-Be) | Strategic details |
| Events (Energy, Pharma…) | Strategic themes | Consolidating all vertical thematic content here (past and future). No longer a chronological list of events, but an evergreen hub of topics. |
| Events (Energy, Pharma…) | Agenda | Becomes the purely operational page for logistics, featuring date lists, search modes, and event filtering to simplify the user experience. |
| Press | Press & insight | Maintaining the traditional press review but integrating high-value analytical content (e.g., trend reports and statistics). |
| Promoters / Partners | Network | The fragmented “promoters” and “partner” pages naturally merge here as subcategories. |
| Promoters / Partners | Membership | Transparently presents the different network joining levels (e.g., Corporate Member, Strategic Partner, Main Sponsor) with clear conversion paths. |
| (Hidden in UI) | Institutional program | A dedicated section for policy documents and guidelines, highlighted exclusively when the “Institution” view is active. |
UI focus: the first 60 seconds (Hero section & navigation)
To execute the new strategy, I completely redesigned the platform’s entry point, moving away from passive aesthetics towards active, user-driven tools:
- From background video to smart search: I abandoned the purely decorative background video in the hero section in favor of a functional “smart search” bar placed squarely at the center of the scene. It acts as an immediate work tool.
- Rapid filters: immediate dropdowns below the search bar allow users to filter by “partner” or “theme” without having to dig through complex navigation menus.
- Trending tags: I implemented visual suggestions (e.g., #GreenDeal, #Cybersecurity) to intercept current trends, enabling “zero-query search” and allowing navigation with a single click.
- Thematic mega menu: a fully expanded dropdown structure that immediately reveals the depth of the content (sub-themes and industrial sectors) without forcing multiple clicks, drastically improving the discovery of editorial pieces.
Design rationale & UI principles
Typography: digital legibility optimization. I selected the Onest font family for its high x-height, guaranteeing exceptional legibility on small screens. Its geometric yet humanist character gives the brand a modern, accessible “tech” tone, perfectly aligning with Connact’s innovative vision.
Functional iconography: cognitive shortcuts. I integrated linear icons to act as visual anchors. They serve as powerful cognitive shortcuts, allowing users to rapidly scan the interface and identify content without reading every label, drastically speeding up navigation.
System feedback (Nielsen’s heuristics): To ensure absolute system status visibility, I implemented toggle switches and toast notifications. This clarifies the current operational mode at all times. Immediate visual feedback prevents user errors and reduces cognitive load by confirming actions.
UI aesthetics: approachable B2B design. Rounded borders and generous whitespace intentionally soften the typical rigidity of corporate B2B portals. My approach makes the interface fluid and welcoming, specifically easing the reading experience for dense institutional content.
Wayfinding (semantic color coding): my strategic use of color differentiates semantic paths. This subconsciously guides the user toward the sections most relevant to their specific role, minimizing drop-off rates.
Modular architecture (atomic design): the interface is architected on a modular system utilizing Tailwind CSS. This structural choice ensures flawless visual consistency, guarantees scalability, and facilitates seamless future front-end handoff without generating technical debt.
Next steps & KPIs
- Usability testing: conducting moderated sessions with a sample of 5 users (3 corporate, 2 institutional) using an interactive prototype. The primary goal is to validate the comprehension of the “dual view system” and measure the time required to complete critical tasks (e.g., “find the energy report”).
- Defining monitoring KPIs: implementing analytical tracking (GA4) to measure post-launch success. The main KPIs to observe will be:
- Usage rate of the company/institution switch.
- Retention time on the “strategic themes” pages.
- Conversion rate on the new membership page (contact requests).
- Content population: collaborating with the editorial team to structure the first “thematic verticals”, ensuring that each section (e.g., finance, defense) has an initial set of articles and vision documents to avoid the “empty box” effect at launch.
- Iteration cycle: analyzing the data collected after the first month of going live to refine the interface and correct any navigation bottlenecks.
Conclusion
The true business value generated by my redesign is a scalable system that intuitively guides the user rather than confusing them. It intelligently segments traffic and synergistically enhances the value of both the physical events and the core editorial content, proving the measurable impact of strategic UX design.
Useful links
- Wireframe hi-fi ready for testing
- Home Company / Institution (Toggle switch)
- Agenda
- Single page event
- Figma File
