D&I Site & Calendar

The Problem

A new hire at Nike wants to find their people: the veterans network, PRIDE, the community that already gets it. At a company Nike's size, those communities exist. Finding them was the hard part. Nike's Diversity & Inclusion networks, events, and resources were scattered across internal sites, buried in email threads, and spread over SharePoint pages. Eight employee networks, and no single door into any of them.

The obvious move was the wrong one

A D&I microsite of its own was the tempting build: a dedicated home, a memorable address, a place to point people to. It was also one more place to remember, one more tab to lose, one more place for belonging to get buried. So I made the opposite bet, and built it where people already were, inside Nike's Digital Employee Experience, the internal employee platform already live as a closed beta in early 2018. That beta was not a mockup. It was running, already inviting employees to Explore, Scrutinize, and Contribute, already carrying a People and Networks slot in its top navigation, waiting for exactly this. Consolidation would beat a fresh address, and I would settle that bet with real employees rather than a design review. Belonging should not live at a separate address.

The build

The D&I site is the fully designed networks and events experience inside that platform, and it was more than a stack of screens. The create-an-event flow at the top of this page is a working click-through, the whole path an organizer takes to put an event on the calendar, prototyped as an interaction rather than drawn as static comps. Behind it, every screen lived in one master Sketch file: the network pages, the consolidated calendar, the membership flows, and the Resources area, with an archive of earlier directions beside them. One file, one source of truth, so the calendar a person saw on their phone was the same calendar the D&I team approved on their desktop. The platform around it was a team effort; the D&I experience inside it, from the network pages to the admin queue to the pilot research, was mine.

The hard parts were all in the seams, where eight independent networks had to share one system without flattening into sameness. The calendar had to gather every network's events into a single feed and still let a person pull it down to just theirs, by network, by place, by the kind of event it was, each card carrying its own network's colors and name, so you knew whose it was at a glance. Every network needed a page with real depth behind it: what it stood for, how it planned, how it measured itself, and the way in. The D&I team had to be able to run all of it, submit, manage, and moderate, without a designer on call. And all of it held its shape from a 2560px desktop down to a 750px phone, redrawn for each screen rather than shrunk to fit.

Everything behind one door

Everything that used to be scattered now lived behind one door. The eight networks, every event, the mission and the strategy, the way in, all reachable from inside Nike's HR portal instead of hunted across SharePoint and email. A person could open a network, read what it stood for, and join it without leaving the page they started on. The calendar carried the same idea: chronological listings with network badges and location tags, so an event was something you came across, not something you had to already know about.

Key Deliverables

• Self-service admin: an events review-and-approval queue the D&I team runs without a designer
• Consolidated calendar architecture: eight network feeds in one filterable event stream
• Network join flow and membership management
• Video state management (upload and missing states)
• 20 responsive screens in total, 9 desktop and 11 mobile, all at @2x

The Experience: Desktop and Mobile

Designed for both from the start: the consolidated calendar events feed, and the event page a person lands on after tapping through.

Eight networks, one place to belong

Eight networks share this calendar, and the sidebar names every one: Ability & Friends, Ascend & Friends, Black Employee & Friends, Latino & Friends, Nike Military Veterans & Friends, Native American & Friends, PRIDE, and Women of Nike & Friends, alongside the global Nike, Inc. calendar. A person can pull the feed down to just theirs, or open any network to read what it stands for, how it plans and measures itself, and how to join, all right there in the calendar. That Submit Event button opens the create-an-event flow shown at the top of this page, the real path a network organizer followed to put an event on the calendar.

The Join Flow let a visitor join a network and its chapter networks in one pass, and made clear what joining meant and which networks they had joined. The Edit Membership flow let members change their level of involvement, or leave, and spelled out what each level meant and what leaving a network entailed.

Admin: Review & Approve Events

The self-service admin let the D&I team run the platform themselves: an events-pending-review queue to approve or respond to submissions, plus the same filtered calendar the team already lived in.

Tested with a pilot

I did not validate this in a hallway. My team ran Experience Insiders, Nike's standing employee research panel, and that panel is who I put the work in front of. A pilot release went out in April 2020 to 603 people, 53 stakeholders and 550 Experience Insiders. 87 completed the survey, a self-report questionnaire, a 14% response against the 603 invited. Real employees, not a hunch.

The instrument was a survey, so I read it as one: not observed task metrics, but what people told me. On the things they came to do, most succeeded. 74% found the information they were after (64 of 87), and of those who tried the membership actions, 84% could join a network (61 of 73) and 80% could leave one (43 of 54). On whether the writing was clear, 84% said the home page was and 85% said the same of the individual network pages. And 85% hit no technical issues at all. The lowest number, that 74%, is the one I paid the most attention to.

The write-in answers were worth more than the scores. Of the 51 people who suggested an improvement, the asks sorted and ranked themselves: 12 wanted more imagery on the network and home pages, 11 wanted more content (how to engage, what joining a network actually means, what a network had done before), 7 wanted tighter design consistency, and 5 wanted a fuller calendar of events. That is a backlog, prioritized by the people who would live with it.

The single most useful note came from the long tail, not the top. One person wrote that the Edit Membership control read to them as the way to unsubscribe. On its own that is one voice, but the same join-and-edit friction had surfaced more than once: it showed up in the technical-issues tally as broken join and edit-membership buttons, and again in two separate write-ins, one asking for a confirmation after joining, one who could not find where to join or unsubscribe at all. One reader gave the sharpest words to something the rest of the data was already circling. That convergence is why the Edit Membership flow now spells out each level of involvement and what leaving a network actually entails, why a join confirmation got added, and why the whole join-and-edit experience got its own focused pass after the pilot. A confusing label named by one careful reader, confirmed across the data, and fixed for everyone.

Why it matters

The pilot was the validation gate, and the build cleared it in April 2020, the same few weeks the pandemic sent Nike's stores and offices home. I can tell you what the pilot proved. I can't tell you how far the rollout eventually traveled, and the honest version is the more useful one anyway. What it proved: the scattered sites, the buried email threads, the SharePoint pages could collapse into one place a person could walk into and find their people, and the D&I team could run that place themselves, posting and approving events and keeping the networks current without a designer in the loop. That was the real deliverable. Not a set of screens, but a place to belong, built so the community it served could carry it forward on its own. The bet underneath it is the one I would make again anywhere: put the new thing where people already are instead of standing up a vanity address, settle the call with real users before you defend it in a review, and design the handoff so the team that inherits it can run it without you.