Case Study
Chubb set out to transform their primary digital touchpoint, their global website, into a coherent and scalable platform. The goal was to ensure that products and services were consistently presented across local offices on five continents, while giving regional teams the flexibility to speak to their own markets.
Operating in more than 54 countries with product offerings that vary significantly by region, Chubb's web presence had grown organically over decades. The transformation meant migrating everything to Adobe Experience Manager, a significant technical undertaking that needed to be grounded in a clear content and structural strategy before a single line of code was written.
The project required solving several intersecting problems simultaneously.
Identifying user groups from existing research and determining how to serve businesses, individuals and families, and agents and brokers, each with fundamentally different needs and entry points.
Global vs. local authorship: determining which content components could be customized by local teams, and which had to remain under global editorial control for brand and compliance reasons.
Product and service heterogeneity: offerings vary widely from country to country, with no shared taxonomy, no single sign-in, and different regulatory requirements applying in every market.
Stakeholder engagement: managing opinions, priorities, and review calendars across teams in dozens of countries required as much strategic thinking as the design work itself.
Extreme use cases: designing for XL (the USA, with the broadest product range and highest traffic) and XS (Pakistan, with a minimal product set), while accounting for language preferences and right-to-left reading in Arabic-speaking markets.
A massive migration: moving years of legacy content to Adobe Experience Manager, requiring a content model flexible enough to support both the existing estate and everything yet to come.
Rather than starting with visual design, we started with structure. The solution was built in layers: first understanding relationships between content types, then systematizing page templates, and finally defining the navigation and authorship framework that would hold it all together.
Defined the relationships between industries, products, coverage types, and experts, creating a shared vocabulary that could scale across 54 markets.
Systematized all page types and their components, from persona homepages to product detail pages, giving local teams a flexible toolkit with global guardrails.
A flexible navigation architecture that worked across every market, supporting regional personas and their distinct content needs.
A publishing model where global guardrails coexisted with local editorial freedom — some components locked, others open to regional customisation.
Wrote page briefs, defined component-level content specifications, and established voice and tone parameters that could flex across three personas and dozens of languages.
Stress-tested against markets with the broadest and narrowest product ranges, and validated for right-to-left reading directions.
The persona selector, a single navigation pattern visible on every page, had to orient three fundamentally different user types without making the interface feel fragmented. Each persona receives a tailored experience with distinct navigation, relevant CTAs, and contextual content, triggered by a single hover interaction.
Individuals and Families
Businesses
Agents and Brokers
Before any navigation or page design could begin, we needed to understand how Chubb's core content objects related to each other. The entity relationship model defined how industries, products, coverage types, case studies, experts, and insights connected, and governed what content could appear where.
Entity relationships
The navigation had to work across every Chubb market, supporting regional personas with relevant primary pages, and an optional secondary nav bar for markets with more robust content and offerings. Global functionality appeared consistently in the utility nav bar.
Navigation framework
Footer framework consistently displays relevant links while meeting local requirements
Once the sitemap was approved, each page started with a content requirements document — a structured inventory of what the page needed to do, for whom, and with what information. Those requirements fed into a page brief that became the blueprint for both UI design and copywriting, ensuring structure and content were developed in parallel rather than one after the other. Every page type was then templated in Figma, from persona homepages to product detail pages, each defining required and optional components, their order, and the rules that governed them.
Page system overview
The design system was built to flex across languages, scripts, and reading directions. The Japanese market illustrates how the same structural framework, including the persona selector, navigation, and component hierarchy, adapts to a completely different language and visual context without requiring a separate design system.
Chubb Japan: Different alphabet, same content architecture
I had the distinct pleasure of working with Louise for more than a year on a major website redesign that I led for Chubb. Louise was the lead UX Strategist on that project and she was instrumental to the ultimate success of the work.
For reasons too numerous to list here, this was an extremely complex project and we presented Louise with a tough assignment. Louise embraced the challenge and delivered great value. I found her to be thoughtful, creative and flexible. Given the complexity of our business, we encountered frequent hurdles throughout the strategic design process. In each instance, Louise offered great solutions. Louise was always thinking about our project. Going well beyond the brief, she seemed to enjoy puzzling out those tricky questions to land on approaches that work for the business and, more important, for the audience.
The hallmark of a good agency/design partner is someone who constantly pushes me and makes me think. That's Louise. She brings a wealth of experience, and leverages it to exceed expectations. I would welcome the opportunity to work with Louise again.
The framework delivered a scalable, governable platform, one that gave Chubb the ability to grow their digital presence globally without sacrificing consistency or local relevance.
The content model, navigation framework, and component system formed the structural backbone for Chubb's migration to Adobe Experience Manager, giving engineering, design, and editorial teams a shared language and a clear set of rules for building out the platform.
Wouldn't have survived this one without Nicole Hampton, Isa Sousa, Sharif Matar, and Chrissy Wallo. A tough, complicated project made worth it by the people on it.