Background
Porsche Partner Network is the global identity and access management portal connecting Porsche’s dealers, suppliers, and internal teams with the systems and digital tools they rely on daily. It handles authentication, access control, and secure collaboration across thousands of users and markets.
By 2023 the platform was showing its age. The interface had grown inconsistent, accessibility was limited, and the experience no longer felt like Porsche. That last point mattered more than it might sound. For a brand built on precision and quality, a clunky partner portal is not a minor inconvenience. It is a signal about how the brand values the people working within its ecosystem.
Working with Porsche’s internal design team and iC Consult’s developers, I led the design effort to bring PPN up to the standard the brand demanded.
The Challenge
The brief was straightforward on the surface: modernise the portal, align it with Porsche’s design system, improve usability. In practice it was more complicated.
Porsche’s design system had been built primarily for marketing and retail. It was refined, visually rich, and very deliberate in how it expressed the brand. IAM is a different context entirely. Forms, authentication flows, role selection, access management. The design constraints are tighter, the hierarchy needs to be cleaner, and users are trying to complete tasks efficiently rather than experience a brand moment.
The tension I had to resolve was how to bring genuine Porsche brand quality into a functional enterprise context without the brand overwhelming the interface or the interface stripping out the brand. Getting that balance wrong in either direction would have been a problem.
On top of that, the delivery process itself needed fixing. iC Consult’s developers were working without structured design input. Handoff was ad hoc, documentation was thin, and design decisions were being made during build rather than before it.
My Approach
I started with a full audit of the existing portal and its IAM workflows, mapping user journeys from login through to dashboard access. Heuristic analysis identified where the experience was failing: confusing access flows, redundant sign-in steps, inconsistent styling across partner tools, and contrast levels that did not meet accessibility standards.
Alongside the UX audit I spent time understanding the boundaries of Porsche’s design system. What was fixed, what was flexible, and where there was room to interpret rather than just apply. That distinction mattered enormously for what came next.
The Design System Work
The most significant design decision on this project was creating a dedicated PPN sub-brand layer within Porsche’s wider design system.
Rather than forcing the existing retail-facing system into an IAM context, or starting from scratch, I worked with Porsche’s digital design team to define a layer that preserved the visual DNA of the brand while being purpose-built for enterprise use. That meant adapting the token structure for functional contexts, defining component patterns specific to authentication and access management, and establishing hierarchy rules that prioritised task clarity without losing the sense of quality the brand requires.
The sub-brand gave developers something they had not had before: a shared reference point that was both technically usable and brand-approved. Design tokens translated directly into front-end variables for the Ping Identity platform. Component documentation gave engineers a clear specification to build from. The gap between what was designed and what was built narrowed considerably.
Getting developer buy-in took patience rather than force. Many of the iC Consult engineers had not worked within a design-led model before. The shift required was not just process, it was mindset. Regular working sessions, annotated handoffs, and making the system genuinely easy to use rather than just comprehensive helped bring people along gradually.
Prototyping & Validation
I built interactive Figma prototypes covering the full range of core flows: login and multi-factor authentication, partner onboarding and role selection, and dashboard navigation.
These replaced static specifications as the primary reference for both stakeholders and developers. Porsche’s internal teams could test and refine designs before a line of code was written, which reduced rework and gave the approval process a much clearer foundation. High-fidelity prototypes early in the process also helped position the design work as strategic rather than decorative, which mattered for stakeholder confidence.
The Solution
The redesigned PPN portal brought Porsche’s design standards into an enterprise context in a way that had not existed before. Authentication flows were simplified, navigation was restructured around how partners actually move through the platform, and the visual language was precise and consistent throughout.
Accessibility was resolved to meet WCAG 2.2 AA standards. The component library gave developers a stable, documented system to build from. And the portal looked and felt like Porsche, which sounds simple but required careful decisions at every level of the design.
Outcomes
The sub-brand and component framework developed for PPN were subsequently adopted for other Porsche IAM portals. What started as a solution for one platform became a reusable foundation across the IAM estate. New portals can now be built significantly faster because the design decisions do not need to be made from scratch each time.
The delivery model introduced on this project, structured handoffs, shared component documentation, and regular design and build reviews, was established as the working approach for future Porsche engagements. That shift in how the teams collaborate is probably the outcome with the longest tail.
Reflection
The most interesting design problem on this project was not the UX. It was the system question. How do you take a brand as specific and controlled as Porsche and make it work in a context it was never designed for, without losing what makes it Porsche?
The answer was not to compromise in both directions and meet somewhere in the middle. It was to understand the brand well enough to know where its quality came from, and then rebuild that quality from the ground up for a different context. Typography, spacing, hierarchy, interaction feedback. The brand is not just visual assets. It is the feeling of precision those assets create. That is transferable if you are rigorous about it.