the brief.
NVA is one of the world's largest veterinary organizations, and it needed to pull a fragmented digital ecosystem into a single, cohesive platform, while balancing corporate brand consistency against the autonomy of 1,000+ independently operated hospitals. The site had to serve genuinely different audiences (job seekers, prospective clinic partners, internal staff, industry peers) and ship as a flexible design system NVA's own development team could implement.
the challenge.
A decentralized network is a brand problem and an architecture problem at once. The organically grown web ecosystem was diluting the brand and confusing users; the journeys for each audience were tangled together; and the people-first, local identity that defines NVA couldn't be sacrificed to corporate uniformity. On top of that, the build would happen in-house, so the deliverables had to be rigorous enough that an internal team could execute them without us in the room.
the process.
We ran strategic alignment sessions with NVA's marketing and IT teams to set business goals, prioritize audiences, and map the content architecture, then designed around three primary personas (job seekers, potential veterinary partners, and existing community members), each with its own clear, empathetic pathway. We accounted for the real integrations the platform depends on (Averture for applicant tracking, Yext for location services, Weglot for French-language support), carved out region-specific content zones to differentiate NVA Canada, and produced annotated, developer-ready files so the internal team could build from them directly.
the solution.
a modular system built for global scale.
We delivered a full UX and UI redesign as a modular, persona-driven design system: flexible content publishing, regional customization to balance global and local messaging, and a foundation built to grow and localize. The handoff files were optimized for NVA's internal dev workflows, so the design could become a live site in their hands, not ours.
the outcome.
NVA's brand story now reads consistently across the U.S., Canada, and international markets, with content discoverability and audience journeys clarified, and an internal team able to publish and manage on its own. The fragmented ecosystem was consolidated into one cohesive platform (a countable reduction) and the system was built so NVA's people-first, decentralized philosophy survives inside a unified frame.
The careers platform in motion: one story, a thousand hospitals.
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