Case study · The network's primary B2B platform
Mastercard Connect is the primary touchpoint between the network and every customer it has — issuers, acquirers, and processors. I spent roughly four years embedded in it, running the research behind a platform-wide modernization.
Connect is where the network's customers actually do business with Mastercard — a self-service portal hosting a sprawling catalog of applications across issuing, acquiring, disputes, tokenization, data, and billing. A representative slice of what lives there:
Application names shown are publicly documented in Mastercard's own Connect materials. Specific client data and internal detail are kept confidential.
Connect doesn't just host apps — it sorts everything into item types: applications, reports, and products, each behaving differently. The platform signaled those types with a color-coded card system — three or four colors, each carrying a distinct meaning that very few users actually understood. I worked on that taxonomy directly: how items get categorized, labeled, and visually coded so people can tell what they're looking at before they click.
The platform was migrating its applications from a legacy generation to a new one — major design overhauls, and sometimes functional ones too. The catch: these are tools real businesses run their operations on every day, so nothing could regress. The work was sequenced from the most critical applications down, and it ran for years.
My job was the research and design guidance underneath that migration: understanding how each app was actually used, where it failed people, and what "better" had to mean before a single screen was rebuilt.
For a long time, customers complained about Connect and no one could quite say why. The pattern only showed up once you watched people use it: the platform had two separate applications with names so close that nobody could remember which did what.
Everyone felt the friction; nobody had named the actual problem. It wasn't a visual-design issue or a missing feature — it was an information-architecture and naming problem hiding in plain sight, the kind that only surfaces when you sit with real users instead of reading the org chart.
One application in this migration I didn't just research — I designed it. Customer Parameter Management began as a legacy two-axis spreadsheet, dense with the logic that codes how card programs behave. I rebuilt it as a single-axis web application that lost none of that functionality — working from Connect's design system and style guides, and from my own usability research, with the few true domain experts almost entirely unavailable to help.
Two months on paper. It took me a year — and it's the deepest financial-services knowledge I've ever built.
Spend four years inside one platform and you stop seeing screens and start seeing the system — the place where a small naming decision quietly taxes thousands of customers every day. Finding those is the work I'm best at.
A slice of a deeper toolkit — 70+ named research, product, and facilitation methods, drawn from a working library of 175+ structured activities. The right ones get pulled for the problem in the room.