02 · Higher Ed
Cutting 20-plus navigation menus down to one a student could use
Pages redesigned
Users on the 2FA onboarding flow
Navigation menus consolidated
Situation
A public university site grows the way most of them do: one department adds a page, then a menu, then a sub-menu, for twenty years, and nobody's responsible for the whole thing. By the time I got there, the site had grown past 5,000 pages and 20-plus separate navigation structures, and the admissions section ran through a maze nobody had audited.
Approach
Redesigning a nav is an information-architecture and product decision every time: what belongs together, what's load-bearing and what's just old, what a student can find in two clicks versus eight.
Navigation & IA
Helped decide what to keep, merge, or cut across 20-plus navigation menus, and worked on new content templates, landing pages, and custom iconography so the admissions section could be scanned instead of read line by line.
2FA onboarding
Helped build and ship the onboarding landing page that walked 20,000-plus users through the university's two-factor authentication rollout, without triggering a support ticket spike.
Outcome
More than 5,000 pages got a new structure. Twenty-plus menus became one structure people could navigate. I still think about that project every time a client asks me to "just add one more link" to a nav bar that already has twelve.
- 5,000+ pages restructured
- 20+ navigation menus consolidated into one structure
- 2FA onboarding landing page shipped for 20,000+ users
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