BUPA
I led the complete UX co-creation process for BUPA Global Latin America's Digital Workplace — a 10-day sprint with 16+ employees across 4 countries that produced 4 proto-personas, current-state journey maps, a prioritised digital scenario roadmap and a UI proposal for the corporate intranet on Office 365. All deliverables were validated by the client.
BUPA Global Latin America — a multinational across Mexico, Dominican Republic, Colombia and Brazil — operated without an internal digital platform: collaboration via WhatsApp, institutional communication via email and scattered HR processes with no centralised channel.
Design the Digital Workplace from scratch on Office 365 with real user evidence before building anything — so the platform would have genuine adoption in an organisation where nothing like it had been offered before.
10-day co-creation sprint with 16–20 employees from 4 countries: digital maturity survey → journey maps with Six Hats → proto-personas → prioritised scenario roadmap → collaborative sketching → base UI proposal.
7 of 7 deliverables validated and approved by the client. Prioritised digital scenario roadmap based on real behaviour — available as a foundation for implementation.
BUPA Global Latin America (BGLA) had no internal digital platform for its employees. The organisation — a multinational distributed across multiple LATAM countries — ran its internal communications, HR processes and cross-area collaboration through fragmented channels: email, WhatsApp groups, calls between colleagues. There was no Digital Workplace. When BUPA decided to build one on Office 365, the challenge wasn't improving something that existed: it was designing from scratch a platform employees would genuinely adopt in a context where nothing like it had been offered before.
The outcome was predictable: employees resolved their collaboration needs through channels not designed for that purpose. Without information architecture, content strategy or integration with real work processes, any intranet built without user evidence would share the same fate as most corporate intranets: a portal no one visits. The sprint's journey maps confirmed it: the needs existed, but were resolved in parallel, with fragmented tools.
The business risk was real: a multinational with employees in Mexico, Dominican Republic, Colombia and Brazil can't scale its culture, communications or internal processes without a digital channel its employees actually adopt. Building that channel without user evidence was the direct path to an intranet no one would use. The co-creation process wasn't an optional step: it was the condition for the DWP to have any real chance of adoption.
- Employees distributed across multiple countries with different organisational cultures and digital maturity levels
- Predefined technology platform: Office 365 / SharePoint — the design had to adapt to its native capabilities
- Stakeholders from multiple areas (Communications, HR, Marketing, IT) with different expectations about the solution
- 10-day on-site sprint — no room for lengthy prior research cycles
BUPA BGLA employees needed to collaborate, access institutional information and communicate across areas and countries through a centralised digital platform — without relying on informal channels like WhatsApp or unstructured email.
No platform existed designed for employees' real needs. The absence of that channel forced them to resolve collaboration with fragmented tools not designed for structured collaboration.
The project started from scratch — there was no prior intranet to diagnose. On day 2 of the sprint, a digital maturity survey was applied to 2% of BUPA's population to calibrate the gap between what employees were using and what the DWP would need to offer to be relevant. Day 5 journey maps — facilitated with employees themselves using Six Hats and emotion canvases — revealed real work patterns: what information they looked for, which channels they used to find it and what frictions they faced without a centralised channel.
Built from real behaviour patterns during the co-creation sprint — not business archetypes or stakeholder assumptions.
Jorge Zuluaga
26Efficient portal with up-to-date information and fast access to processes without needing intermediaries.
Carlos Valenzuela
32Relevant, up-to-date content that's easy to find. Visibility into regional progress and projects.
Ursula Cardenas Vuelvas
43DWP as a real work tool: collaborative, multilingual (ES, EN, PT) and non-intrusive.
Focus and profiling — structured co-creation over individual interviews
NQV Canvas to align stakeholders on the real problem before entering solutions. Digital maturity survey + 'Anchor and Boat' activity to map pains and desires from each area. SCAMPER in age-segmented groups with 16–20 people per profile, including empathy maps. Key decision: structured co-creation over individual interviews — when stakeholders see their own colleagues as the person they described, ownership of the problem shifts.
Experiential diagnosis — pains stop being opinions and become patterns
Ideas Safari: participants identified their frictions and dreams around the ideal digital solution. Current-state journey maps built with a challenges map, emotion canvas and Six Hats technique — the most revealing exercise because it forced participants to see the problem from different angles without defending positions. Output: pains stopped being anecdotal opinions and became documented patterns that no stakeholder could dismiss.
Prioritisation and design — the client co-designed the screens, not received them cold
Prioritisation Canvas (Importance vs. Time) to build the digital scenario roadmap together with the client. Collaborative sketching: 4–8 prioritised solution screens, co-designed with the Product Owner. Base UI proposal adapted to BUPA's corporate identity and Office 365's native capabilities. Key decision: include sketching as a collaborative activity — when the client co-designed the screens, alignment on the UI proposal was immediate.
Pre-delivery and delivery — pivot from 'what the business wants to publish' to 'what the employee needs to find'
Full intervention document — proto-personas, journey maps, roadmap and digital maturity survey results — presented first to the project lead and then to area managers with incorporated adjustments. Pivot moment: the journey maps and ideas safari revealed that employees' real needs differed from what business areas assumed. That shift redefined the prioritised scenario roadmap.
A 10-day co-creation sprint was executed with all deliverables validated and approved by the client before the implementation phase began.
Sprint validation — 4 countries · 16–20 participants
| Validation | |
|---|---|
| Digital maturity survey (2% BUPA population) | ✓ Validado por el cliente |
| 4 proto-personas built from real behaviour | ✓ Validadas por el cliente |
| Empathy maps per profile | ✓ Validados por el cliente |
| Current-state journey maps + challenges map | ✓ Validados por el cliente |
| Prioritised digital scenario roadmap (Importance vs. Time) | ✓ Validado por el cliente |
| Solution sketches (4–8 screens) | ✓ Validados por el cliente |
| Base UI proposal adapted to Office 365 and BUPA identity | ✓ Validada por el cliente |
- From business assumptions ('we build what the business wants to publish') to employee perspective ('we build what the employee needs to find') — the pivot that redefined the roadmap
- From collaboration scattered across WhatsApp and unstructured email to a DWP roadmap with information architecture based on real behaviour evidence
- From anecdotal stakeholder pains to documented patterns in journey maps that no business area could dismiss
- From 4 countries operating disconnected to 7 validated deliverables as a common foundation for a LATAM-scale platform
The project did not advance to implementation due to an internal client decision — not because of the sprint results or the quality of the deliverables. All 7 deliverables were approved before that decision was made. The co-creation process and UI proposal remained available as a documented foundation to resume the project in future phases.
The 10-day sprint produced solid diagnosis and clear direction, but without agreed success metrics from day 1. Today I'd establish upfront which concrete indicator we'd move — weekly return rate, use of specific Office 365 tools, reduction of informal channel queries — so the delivered roadmap wasn't just a list of initiatives but a measurable commitment.
The co-creation mapped the end-user employee's needs very well, but the DWP backstage — who publishes, who governs content, who keeps the information architecture updated — required service design work that went beyond the sprint. Some identified pains (outdated content, lack of publication strategy) were organisational process problems that no visual redesign solves on its own. That gap between channel design and service design is something I'd treat as an explicit deliverable from the start today.
