The portal existed; the community didn’t

The knowledge was already in the building. There was no route between people.

Practice — Service design · Behavioural design · Brand identity · Design research
Role — Delivered as strategy and design direction
Period — During the Wipro Digital years (2018–2022)
Client — Internal · Wipro Digital

Somewhere to post it did not create a reason to.

A Wipro engineer has something worth sharing. A reusable component, a way round a problem, a case study another team would pay for. There is already a place to put it — the DX Technology Community Portal, Wipro’s internal platform for exactly this.

He doesn’t post it. Not because the platform is hard to use. Because nothing in his day gives him a reason to.

Competitions and hackathons had already been tried. They moved the numbers while they ran, then the activity fell away. Engagement kept being treated as a campaign, so it kept behaving like one.

Two constraints came with the rebuild: whatever replaced it could not become an administrative burden to run, and it had to be business-effective rather than merely well attended.

Three lines of enquiry ran before a single screen. A heuristic audit of the existing portal, to establish what was structurally wrong before asking anyone’s opinion. Interviews and group discussions across Wipro’s employee base, for how developers actually work and share. And a study of collaborative platforms and online communities elsewhere, for what sustains participation where it already works.

The rules we designed by

Engagement is a loop, not a campaign.

The repository grows as a by-product of people using the place — never as a task.

Inherit the parent brand’s authority; own enough of it to be chosen rather than mandated.

What we did

01 · Audited before asking.
Heuristic analysis first, opinions second. Structural problems do not show up in a survey of people who have already stopped using something.

02 · Built on the Hook Model, not another hackathon.
A competition supplies an external trigger and nothing else — when it ends, the loop has nowhere to go. We paired external cues with an internal trigger, so the platform is reached for rather than remembered.

03 · Promoted nine principles above the feature list.
Why people contribute, why they stay, and what makes it work — a gig economy inside the enterprise, career growth from reusable work, ownership of what is shown of you, contribution made visible and credited, and discoverability that actually searches across systems.

04 · Drew it, rather than shipping another system.
Enterprise platforms arrive looking like systems. One illustration style built from Wipro’s palette, the community’s story told in frames, and its people drawn back to themselves. The system made it credible; the illustration made it theirs.

05 · Gave it an identity that sits inside the parent without disappearing.
Too corporate and employees treat it as another mandate. Too far away and it loses the trust the Wipro name carries. The dot-and-line mark — seven dots, seven behaviours — was the answer.

Project highlights

The challenge — A place, not a reason
The expertise existed, held by people with no route to each other. A portal already existed too. Hackathons lifted participation while they ran and lost it the moment they stopped.

The approach — Design the loop
Heuristic audit, primary research across the employee base, and a study of communities that sustain themselves. Then a platform built on the Hook Model and nine principles, with an identity of its own.

The outcome — A blueprint, and nine rules
Delivered as strategy and design direction: a platform blueprint and nine guiding principles for the community to be rebuilt on, plus its brand system and illustration language.

Gallery

Seven dots, seven behaviours — the identity drawn as connections, not a badge.

Three lines of enquiry — competitive analysis, interviews and affinity mapping, before a screen existed.

The loop, not the campaign — internal and external triggers paired, so participation survives the launch.

The community, drawn — contributors and rituals illustrated, so the platform showed its people back to themselves.

Results — “A community and a repository, in the same place.”

What changed for the user
Four behaviours the platform was built to support: contribute openly, so the repository grows as a by-product rather than a task; connect personally, so links form around real work instead of org charts; reach outward, through partnerships and platform integrations; and self-organise, through decentralised communication.

What it was worth

[ outcome to add ] — adoption, contribution rate or reuse. This placeholder is live in the deck and stays visible here on purpose.

The honest line
This was delivered as strategy and design direction — a blueprint and nine principles for the community to be rebuilt on. What happened after it left my hands was never reported back to me, so the page carries no adoption number. It should not invent one.

Nine principles. One loop. No campaign.