SENA
I led the UX/UI redesign of the SENA Public Employment Agency portal —Colombia's main labour intermediary— taking it from an outdated, inaccessible SharePoint site to a production portal that meets Colombia's NTC5854 accessibility standard and MinTIC usability guidelines.
The portal ran on an outdated SharePoint: unmanageable, non-compliant with NTC5854, with content changes made "hot" directly in production.
Redesign the portal to meet NTC5854 and MinTIC within a non-negotiable SharePoint, with the UI committed for January 2021 — mid-pandemic.
Remote inception with three SENA offices, 4 proto-personas, benchmarking against 4 competitors, a new information architecture (home + People and Companies subsites) and dev-ready front-end deliverables.
A production portal with NTC5854 validated against the official checklist, a filterable job search and autonomous content administration.
The APE portal centralised employment information and linked to the transactional labour-intermediation platform, but it was built on an outdated SharePoint: not manageable in any friendly way, non-compliant with Colombia's NTC5854 web accessibility standard, and visually misaligned with the APE brand.
The outcome was predictable: every content change had to be made "hot" in production —there was no pre-production environment— directly hitting the user experience; people with disabilities couldn't use the portal of an institution whose explicit mission includes serving vulnerable populations; and the job board offered no filtering or search, unlike the direct competitors (elempleo.com, Computrabajo, LinkedIn) users relied on daily.
The business risk was real: the APE had generated 462,392 job placements in 2019, and in 2020 the pandemic sent demand for intermediation soaring while the numbers fell (95,060 as of April 2020). An inaccessible, unmanageable portal compromised the institution's legal mandate —including care for victims under Law 1448 of 2011— and its position as the highest-placement operator in the Public Employment Service.
- Public-entity contractual calendar, with UI delivery committed for January 2021
- Deliverables handed over dev-ready (HTML, CSS, JS, SVG on Bootstrap), with no dedicated front-end team during design
- Three offices owning the portal (Employment, IT, Communications) plus external MinTIC and INCI guidelines
- Mandatory SharePoint — design solved with master pages and native components; co-creation and research 100% remote due to COVID-19
Job seekers and employers needed to find, filter and apply to vacancies autonomously through the portal, instead of depending on the regional offices' in-person channel — especially under pandemic restrictions. In parallel, the APE team needed to manage content without technical intervention and without risking production.
The system made it hard. The legacy SharePoint imposed friction on both fronts: users with no search filters or accessibility, and administrators forced to edit in production with no testing environment.
I ran a UX inception through remote sessions with SENA stakeholders. SENA's own technical justification documented that the portal "is not manageable in a friendly way" and was "outdated in image, in functionality and unable to meet NTC5854". The actor map and 4 proto-personas revealed users benchmarked the APE against elempleo.com and Computrabajo (Jakob's Law). The heuristic evaluation and 4-competitor benchmark exposed losses in findability, hierarchy and visual trust. And Óscar's profile —vulnerable population, no email— made tangible that accessibility wasn't a compliance checklist but the difference between including or excluding the very segment the APE is legally mandated to serve.
Built from real behaviour patterns, co-created with the stakeholders who serve users daily — not fictional archetypes.
Jaime
35Actively searches on elempleo.com, Computrabajo, LinkedIn and Torre.
Vacancies matching his role, plus free advice and guidance.
Milena
36Combines contract hunting with an interest in entrepreneurship.
Offers to replace lost contracts and referral to the entrepreneurship area.
Yamile
30Posts vacancies and shortlists candidates for her company.
An agile intermediation partnership and relevant candidates.
Óscar
40Has always worked through referrals; visits temporary offices in person.
A free service, regional visibility and differentiated guidance.
Stakeholder inception and problem definition
I facilitated remote planning, structure, design and messaging sessions with SENA's three offices, combining JTBD, Design Thinking and Lean UX in a double diamond. With three portal-owning offices and external guidelines (MinTIC, INCI), the biggest risk was building on contradictory requirements: I needed alignment before pixels. Decision: the problem wasn't just aesthetic — information architecture and content administration were the root causes. Scope on three fronts: a clear, accessible portal, a competitive job search and autonomous administration.
Proto-personas, actor map and benchmark
I built 4 proto-personas (Alan Cooper's methodology) in co-creation with stakeholders, mapped the role ecosystem, and ran coolhunting/benchmarking against 4 competitors plus a heuristic evaluation of the existing site. With no budget or time for extensive primary research mid-pandemic, proto-personas validated with those who serve users daily were the fastest route to useful evidence. Finding: the four profiles spanned an extreme digital-affinity spectrum — from freelance photographer to a farmer without email — making accessibility and simplicity the dominant design criterion, above visual novelty.
Information architecture and flowmaps
I redesigned the structure into a main home plus two subsites (People and Companies), with solution flowmaps and content categorisation. The two audiences have opposite jobs —finding work vs. finding talent— and mixing them in a single home was the main source of noise. The split also let the portal inherit SENA's mandatory components (PQRS, chat, transparency) without polluting task flows. Key decision: the filterable job search (salary, city, occupational profile, contract type) belonged on the main home, not behind a login — it was the hook to compete with private portals.
UI proposal and development deliverables
I designed the full UI (main home, People home, Companies home, internal templates) on the APE 2020 brand manual and the Microsoft Web Fluent kit, and delivered the front-end assets (HTML, CSS, JS, SVG on Bootstrap) to the development team. SharePoint was non-negotiable: designing against its master pages and native components from day one avoided the classic redesign that dies in implementation, and delivering code —not just mockups— reduced fidelity loss. Every component was validated against the NTC5854 checklist (36 criteria) and MinTIC guidelines (56) during design, not as a later audit.
Accessibility stopped being one requirement and started ordering them all
The initial plan treated accessibility as one more list item (#1 of 52). Building Óscar's profile and reviewing the victims-care mandate (Law 1448) made clear it was the requirement that ordered all the others: the office map (inaccessible JSON → alternative collapsible table), accessible PDF production and the typographic hierarchy were all resolved from that criterion.
| Documented pain | Design response |
|---|---|
| Job board with no filters or search | Filterable search (salary, city, occupational profile, contract type) on the home, no login required |
| No NTC5854 compliance — portal unusable for people with disabilities | 36 criteria validated component by component during design, not as a later audit |
| "Hot" changes directly in production | QA · pre-production · production architecture, with autonomous administration on native components |
| Institutional image misaligned with the APE brand | UI built on the APE 2020 brand manual + Microsoft Web Fluent kit |
| Office map in inaccessible JSON | Alternative collapsible table, accessible to screen readers |
| Two audiences with opposite jobs mixed in one home | Main home + People and Companies subsites with separate flows |
With no quantitative usage baseline, the outcome is measured against the previous portal's state and the regulatory criteria that conditioned GGSI Technical Committee approval.
Before / After
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| NTC5854 accessibility | Sin cumplimiento | Validado · checklist GTI-F-018 |
| Environments | Solo producción — cambios en caliente | QA · Preproducción · Producción |
| Job search | Sin filtros ni búsqueda | Filtros: salario · ciudad · perfil · vinculación |
| Content administration | Dependiente de intervención técnica | Autónoma para el equipo APE |
NTC5854 compliance was validated against the official GTI-F-018 checklist — a requirement the previous portal could not meet.
- From a SharePoint with no NTC5854 compliance to a production portal with accessibility validated against the official checklist
- From "hot" changes in production to a QA · pre-production · production architecture with autonomous administration
- From an unfilterable board to a competitive job search on the home, no login — matching the standard users already knew
- From a misaligned image to a UI built on the APE 2020 brand manual
- From accessibility as requirement #1 of 52 to the criterion that ordered every design decision
SENA approved the design proposal and deliverables. The portal went through the production release protocol (architecture document, functional and technical test results, application record) and now operates at agenciapublicadeempleo.sena.edu.co as the gateway to the transactional labour-intermediation platform, with autonomous content administration for the APE team.
I'd have negotiated a usage-metrics baseline from inception (search usage rate, conversion to the transactional platform, visits per section) to demonstrate the redesign's impact with data, not just the production-release milestone. The analytics requirement (UTM, visit and click counting) existed in the matrix — I could have capitalised on it as a design measurement instrument.
Designing inside SharePoint protected manageability —the client's number-one pain— but capped how far the job search experience could go against the private portals users benchmarked the APE against. The gap between "meeting the standard the user expects" (Jakob) and "what the platform allows" was managed, not eliminated.
