Reimagining the Member Experience: A Full-Scale Website Redesign for PIPSC

PIPSC serves more than 80,000 federal professionals across Canada, and its website plays two very different roles at once. For Members, it needs to be a clear, welcoming source of information and support. For Stewards, it's a working tool: the place they turn to when helping colleagues navigate workplace issues. Over time, the existing site had grown difficult to navigate, with content that was hard to find and a structure that didn't reflect how either audience actually used the site.

PIPSC needed more than a visual refresh. They needed a redesign grounded in a real understanding of who their users are, what they're trying to accomplish, and how the site could be structured to support both everyday Members and the specialized needs of Stewards, while also making the underlying content easier to maintain and translate across the organization's bilingual requirements.

We started by listening. Stakeholder interviews revealed not just PIPSC's goals for the site, but the everyday realities of running a bilingual, member-driven organization. From there, strategy workshops brought the team together to imagine what the site could become: mapping the current state against a future vision, sketching the broader service ecosystem, and drafting early journeys and personas to give the project a shared sense of understanding and direction.

With that foundation set, qualitative interviews, paired with a large-scale member survey, revealed just how differently Members and Stewards experience the site, and where their needs pulled in different directions. Those insights became refined journey maps, personas, and a service blueprint for the Steward experience in particular, a workflow the existing site had never truly supported.

Card sorting exercises let users show us how they think about the content, reshaping the site's architecture around their mental models rather than the organization's internal structure. Wireframes brought that structure to life, and usability testing put it to the test early.

A creative workshop brought PIPSC's vision, mission, values, and goals into the open, and that thinking became the brief that grounded every decision to follow. The colour palette expanded to provide accessibility and an updated look. A new type system, paired with photography that favoured real people and real moments, gave the site warmth and clarity. The site needed to feel like a genuine gathering place for a community of professionals. A second round of usability testing showed the new look didn't come at the cost of ease of use.

A web design system gave PIPSC the components, patterns, and guidelines to keep the site consistent as it grows, while writing templates made content creation and French-English translation far less of a burden for the team managing it day to day.

Akendi stayed embedded through development and technology, working alongside PIPSC's team to support that the thinking behind every research finding and design decision carried through - all the way into the final build.