Visual Design

Bloomberg Law Homepage Design

Redesigned Bloomberg Law's homepage refresh in nearly a decade to increase feature discoverability and deliver a personalized experience for 40,000+ legal professionals.

StatusCurrent Design
3 monthsJune – Oct 2023

01 — My Role

The product team had already committed to a set of homepage sections and the components that would support them. My scope was not to redesign the information architecture from scratch — it was to redesign the visual language of a system already in motion, and to advocate where I could.

The four locked sections were: Your Favorites, Recommended for You, Top Picks from Your Practice Areas, and Pick Up Where You Left Off.

02 — Outcome

Shipped October 2023. Still live.

11K+ users

Unique users engaged with the new homepage experience post-launch

3K+ adopted

Unique users in Q1 2024 — peak adoption quarter

2 weeks

Design-to-handoff timeline from inheritance to engineering

03 — Overview

Bloomberg Law's homepage hadn't been touched in nearly a decade.

The original experience was a dense, utility-first page built for power users who already knew what they were looking for. As Bloomberg Law grew its product suite — adding intelligence centers, AI-powered tools, and personalized research workflows — the homepage stopped functioning as an entry point and became an obstacle.

A contractor was brought in to design a new iteration. The design failed to engage users in testing — feedback cited too much white space and components that felt visually heavy and dark. The contractor left before completing a second iteration, and I was pulled in to take it across the finish line.

Original Homepage Design=
Original Homepage
(2011-2023)
Contrator iteration=
Contrator's iteration
(failed testing)
Contrator iteration=
Shipped Design
(2023)

04 — The Constraints

Designing under constraints

The product team had already committed to a set of homepage sections and the components that would support them. My scope was not to redesign the information architecture from scratch — it was to redesign the visual language of a system already in motion, and to advocate where I could.

The four locked sections were: Your Favorites, Recommended for You, Top Picks from Your Practice Areas, and Pick Up Where You Left Off.

STRATEGIC CALL

The PM initially proposed user testing the homepage design. I wrote the usability test and concluded that given the visual constraints, there wasn't much actionable insight we'd gain from it. The PM agreed and we redirected the research budget toward more complex workflow validation where it would have greater impact.

05 — Design Decisions

Four macro visual design decisions

DECOUPLED THE SEARCH BAR FROM NAVIGATION

The original design embedded Bloomberg Law's Go bar inside an already crowded navigation. The contractor's iteration kept it there. The redesign moved search below the masthead, giving it full-width prominence as the primary action on the page. There was stakeholder pushback, but the rationale held: either simplify the nav, or decouple it from search entirely.

DIFFERENTIATED CARD SECTIONS WITHOUT VISUAL CHAOS

The challenge was making four consecutive card sections feel distinct without the page looking choppy. Each section got a different card treatment: Recommended for You used a blue highlight carousel; Practice Areas used tabbed navigation with accent-colored cards per group; Pick Up Where You Left Off used full-width spanning rows, inspired by how Google designed their browser history — familiar, scannable, and visually differentiated from the denser sections above.

STRICT GRID ALIGNMENT ACROSS ALL SECTIONS

With four visually distinct card sections, the risk was a page that felt fragmented. Every card placement was designed to snap to the grid. The consistency of alignment is what holds the page together despite the variation in card style. This was a deliberate decision to create coherence through structure rather than visual sameness.

SHIFTED THE HOMEPAGE FRO UTILITY TO IDENTITY

The original page greeted every user with the same generic "Popular Links" panel. The redesign opens with a personalized welcome, the user's name, and content surfaced from their own research history and practice areas. This was the business goal — increase discoverability of Bloomberg's intelligence centers — but the execution required making users feel the page belonged to them before asking them to explore.

Explore how I led three research studies, interviewed 40+ attorneys, and a self-directed design sprint shaped Bloomberg Law's AI workspace strategy from a blank slate.