Boeing.com Redesign

Boeing is one of the most recognized companies in the world, but primarily for commercial aviation. Their defense, space, and innovation work, which represents a significant portion of their business, wasn’t visible to most visitors. The site itself reflected that gap: outdated, difficult to navigate, and organized around internal structures rather than the way audiences actually thought about Boeing’s products.

Boeing.com gallery. Created at R&R Partners for Boeing.

The site had over 11,000 pages. That number wasn’t just a technical challenge; it was a symptom. Years of content accumulation with no governing architecture had produced a site that obscured more than it communicated. Our job wasn’t to redesign pages. It was to figure out what the site actually needed to be.

That started with understanding who was using it. We segmented Boeing’s audiences in detail, built personas to capture the distinct needs and mental models of each group, and ran a gap analysis to identify where the existing site was failing them. Paid media visitors, investors, job seekers, defense buyers, and aviation enthusiasts all had fundamentally different reasons to be on the site, and the existing structure treated all of them the same way.

Audience segmentation, personas and gap analysis.

Reducing 11,000 pages to approximately 1,000 without losing anything the primary and secondary audiences needed was the central IA challenge. Every cut required a clear rationale, and every decision about what to keep had to be tied back to persona needs and content value.

The more significant challenge was restructuring how Boeing’s products were organized. The existing taxonomy reflected Boeing’s internal divisions, not how the outside world thought about their work. We proposed a structure built around user mental models instead, and Boeing found it compelling enough to realign their product organization around it.

The structure outlasted the design. Boeing restyled the site in 2026, eleven years after launch, and Commercial, Defense and Space are still the top three items in the global navigation. Much of the page-level structure is intact as well.

Desktop IA: structure, product templates, navigation, notes and legend.

A responsive build answers how pages adapt. It doesn’t answer the harder question of what belongs on mobile at all, and in what order. Usage data and user interviews made the pattern clear: mobile visitors were overwhelmingly current-events oriented. They were checking news, tracking product updates, and following announcements. Desktop visitors were researchers: investors reading annual reports, educators digging into history, suppliers navigating procurement content, business customers doing deep product comparisons.

That difference in intent drove a separate, fully developed mobile IA alongside the desktop structure. It wasn’t a simplified version of the desktop. It was a different editorial position entirely.

The gap analysis matrix, scored for the Boeing web team and for mobile specifically.

Content decisions were made page by page and content type by content type against a gap analysis matrix that scored every item for both the Boeing web team and for mobile specifically. Executive biographies, annual reports, supplier content, Frontiers Magazine, and employee and retiree sections all received explicit mobile exclusions. Product pages, current news, feature stories, military aircraft content, and customer highlights were all confirmed for mobile delivery. The criterion wasn’t whether content was important. It was whether a mobile user, in their likely context and with their likely intent, would benefit from it.

Within individual pages, the same logic applied at the component level. Content that required significant download weight, including large media assets, deep interactive experiences, and document downloads, was deprioritized or deferred on mobile to address real-world performance constraints. The goal was to make sure that what loaded first on a mobile device was what a mobile user was most likely there to find.

We developed two distinct design directions in parallel, both at the wireframe and visual level, to give Boeing a meaningful choice rather than a single take-it-or-leave-it recommendation. Each direction reflected a different set of tradeoffs in how content was prioritized and how the brand was expressed. Interactive wireframes were used to validate interaction models before visual design was applied, keeping the two concerns appropriately separate.

User flows were developed for the site’s highest-priority paths: product model pages, customer feature stories, and military aircraft content. These were the pages that mattered most to both Boeing and their audiences, and making them easily reachable from any point in the site was treated as a core structural requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

Two directions, A and B: homepage and product model page wireframes, with user flows.

The redesign moved the needle across every audience segment we designed for.

Together with the headline numbers above, those results span four distinct audience types: a useful reminder that good IA doesn’t just make things easier to find; it changes how people perceive and engage with a brand.

I was the sole UX designer on the project, leading all experience design work from research through final UI. The most demanding part of the engagement was the IA work: making principled decisions about 11,000 pages while keeping the rationale coherent enough to sell to a major enterprise client, and doing it in a way that held up under stakeholder scrutiny and user testing.

Sole UX designerFunctional & content reqsInformation architectureUser flowsInteraction design & UIUser testingResponsive design