Projects
Overview
During my internship at Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited, I worked on redesigning four legacy digital platforms: the Alumni Portal, MyHPCL, the Vendors Portal, and the Jobs Portal. Each platform served a different audience and came with its own usability challenges, from cluttered layouts and outdated navigation patterns to dense information structures that made important tasks difficult to complete.
My primary focus was the Alumni Portal, which required a more accessibility driven approach because it served retired employees with varying levels of comfort using digital interfaces. The project involved understanding user needs, simplifying complex information, balancing HPCL’s established brand identity, and creating clearer, more approachable digital experiences across the portal ecosystem.
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Research Starting Point: Myth as an Urban System
HPCL operated multiple digital portals for different user groups, including retired employees, current employees, vendors, and job applicants. Over time, these platforms had become information-heavy, visually outdated, and difficult to navigate.
During my internship, I worked on redesigning four key portals: the Alumni Portal, MyHPCL, the Vendors Portal, and the Jobs Portal. The goal was to modernize the overall experience while making each platform clearer, easier to use, and more aligned with its specific audience.
The Alumni Portal became the primary focus of my work because it served retired employees with varied levels of digital comfort. This made the redesign more than a visual update; it required careful attention to readability, accessibility, familiar navigation patterns, and reduced information overload.
Field Research in Himachal Pradesh
Alumni Portal For retired HPCL employees, with a focus on accessibility, readability, and simpler navigation.
MyHPCL For current employees, with a focus on organizing internal resources and improving everyday usability.
Vendors Portal For external vendors, with a focus on clearer information structure and easier task discovery.
Jobs Portal For applicants, with a focus on making job-related information easier to browse and understand.
From Ritual Observation to Design Insight
Before redesigning the portals, I reviewed the existing websites to understand where users were facing friction. The portals had large amounts of information, but the content was not always easy to scan, prioritize, or navigate.
Many pages presented too many links, notices, and actions at once. Important information often competed with secondary content, which made the experience feel cluttered and difficult to follow. The navigation also lacked clear grouping, so users had to spend more time figuring out where to go.
This audit helped identify the main UX issues across the portals: weak visual hierarchy, dense layouts, inconsistent interface patterns, and limited discoverability of important tasks. These findings became the foundation for the redesign direction.
Translating Samkhya Philosophy into Game Logic
The Alumni Portal served retired HPCL employees, which made the project more sensitive than a standard website redesign. The users had different levels of comfort with digital platforms. Some were confident using websites, while others struggled with interactions that designers often assume are simple.
Through user conversations and observations, I learned that many users preferred clear labels, familiar categories, readable text, and important information placed where it was easy to notice. Some users did not naturally scroll through long pages, while others felt overwhelmed by very modern layouts, too many colors, or icon-only navigation.
The key insight was that the redesign could not simply be “modern.” It had to feel clear, familiar, and trustworthy. For this audience, confidence and readability were more important than visual novelty.
Building the World of Shambhala
A major challenge was making the Alumni Portal easier to use without making it look too basic or disconnected from HPCL’s identity. The interface needed to feel modern, but still familiar for users who were used to traditional website structures.
I focused on practical accessibility decisions such as readable typography, stronger contrast, clear section labels, visible buttons, and better spacing between content blocks. Important actions were placed more prominently, and the layout was structured to reduce the number of decisions users had to make at once.
The goal was not to remove complexity by hiding everything. The goal was to organize information in a way that felt calm, predictable, and easier to scan, especially for retired users who could feel overwhelmed by dense or unfamiliar interfaces.
Translating Research into a Playable Framework
A key challenge in this project was balancing different expectations from users and stakeholders. Some retired users preferred more colors and visible elements because it made the portal feel active and familiar. Others preferred a cleaner and more formal interface with less visual noise.
There were also practical trade-offs. Showing every feature on the homepage made the portal feel complete, but it also increased clutter. Using too many colors made the interface look lively, but it reduced readability. More modern layouts looked cleaner, but they could feel unfamiliar to users who were used to traditional website structures.
My role was to translate these different preferences into balanced design decisions. Instead of applying every request directly, I focused on the underlying need behind each request and designed solutions that protected clarity, readability, and consistency.
Designing the Game System
The redesign also had to respect HPCL’s established brand identity. The brand colors were visually strong, so applying them everywhere across the interface could easily make pages feel heavy or difficult to read.
The challenge was to preserve brand recognition while creating a calmer and more accessible digital experience. I used HPCL’s colors more selectively, supported them with neutral backgrounds, and focused on spacing, hierarchy, and contrast to reduce visual fatigue.
The portal also needed to feel formal, trustworthy, and familiar. Since this was an institutional platform, the design could not feel like a trendy consumer product. It had to modernize the experience while still feeling appropriate for HPCL’s users and organizational context.
Components, Manuals & Final Outcome
Beyond the visual redesign, a major part of the project was improving how information was structured. The older portals often presented too many items at the same level of importance, making it harder for users to understand where to begin.
I reorganized content into clearer groups, prioritized frequently accessed sections, and made the homepage function more like a guided entry point instead of a crowded directory. This helped reduce visual competition and made the experience easier to scan.
Across the four portals, I used shared interface patterns such as cards, clear section headers, consistent navigation structures, and reusable content blocks. At the same time, each portal was adapted for its own audience: the Alumni Portal focused on accessibility, MyHPCL on employee resources, the Vendors Portal on task clarity, and the Jobs Portal on discoverability.
