From institutional structure
to student reality

We framed the work around a single question:

What structure best supports financial decision-making, under stress, for first-time and returning students alike?

This led to three deliberate decisions:

Financial information was spread across separate subsites and policy pages — accurate in isolation, but impossible to traverse when a student needed a full answer. I worked in two rounds: propose a structure, test it with students, then cut what didn't hold. The steps below show how that moved from audit to prototype.

Our product vision called for a single subsite organized around student intent — but Student Accounts and the Financial Aid & Awards Office were insistent on maintaining two separate sites. We were confident that split would fail students in practice, so we built Design I anyway: a Student Financial Resources landing page with two nav links into separate subsites, prototyped to surface the friction and prove the case for consolidation.

Design I gave stakeholders the dual subsite model they had asked for — not the single hub we had argued for. Students saw a Student Financial Resources landing page with two main nav items — Tuition & fees and Financial Aid & Awards — each linking to a separate subsite. The landing page also surfaced first-level pages from both sides, so there were two ways into each property.

In round-one testing, participants often clicked either a nav item or a child link on the landing page. Both routes dropped them into a subsite where the navigation changed entirely to reflect that unit's IA. Most didn't register the swap — classic change blindness.

They understood individual pages, but not whether they had covered everything on the other side of the split. The problem wasn't clarity at the page level — it was orientation across subsites.

Clicking a nav item or a child link on the landing page swapped the entire navigation — but participants didn't notice they had left the hub, and often missed information that lived on the other subsite.

We rethought the model — moving away from parallel subsites toward a more unified experience aligned with student intent and key decision moments.

The three high level changes had to be made:

The final experience restructured the financial journey into a clearer, task-oriented flow. Information was grouped by intent, language was simplified, and key tools — such as tuition estimation — were surfaced at the right moments to support decision-making.

The design established consistent UI patterns and a scalable foundation that could support future financial tools and content.

The shipped hub groups tuition, fees, and aid by student intent — not internal ownership. Pre-launch validation showed a meaningful lift in task success before release, and the live experience extends the same information architecture with tools such as the tuition estimator and faceted awards search. See After launch for how the institution adopted the hub once it shipped.