Designing navigation across two brand platforms

The problem

The resources were there. A clear path through them was missing.

Early feedback showed that communicators scrolled past useful content and downloaded assets without finding the guidelines. This led to off-brand materials that the Comms team had to review and help correct.

Different access rules ruled out combining the public site and intranet. I needed to improve the paths through both while keeping them manageable for the teams maintaining them.

Content audit

Start with the files people came to find.

I mapped pages to tasks and used page-visit data to prioritize templates, logos, photography guidelines, and onboarding resources in the navigation.

The tension I had to work with: admins wanted to show the whole collection, while communicators wanted only the resources relevant to their work.

Public site · Tree testing

Test the journey and the wording before designing the pages around them.

I used post-its to test four retrieval tasks: finding a template, photography guidelines, a SALA logo, and onboarding resources, aiming to understand how they browse and find resources. I revised the hierarchy and labels eight times based on wrong turns and stakeholder feedback. The final structure separated broad categories from individual resources.

Intranet · End-user interviews

Communicators looked for their unit. APSC felt like somewhere else.

Having just seen that admin-only testing left a gap on the public site, I pushed to test with end users first this time: task-based interviews directly with communicators from CHBE, SALA, SCARP, and the Dean’s Office, before the team settled on a structure. People relied heavily on Ctrl+F to find files in its overlapping categories.

Several identified with their school, department, or office. They read APSC as the faculty-wide organization and assumed resources under that label might not apply to them.

After these interviews, I added Browse by unit so communicators could choose their school or department and see the templates available to them.

Key changes · Intranet

A clearer path to the right files, with room for the collection to grow.

The interviews shaped four changes to the intranet, shown below: simplified navigation, clearer labels, and two new starting points — Browse by unit and Most used. Communicators needed quick access to files for their unit; admins needed one collection they could maintain.

What shipped

Two reorganized platforms and a structure the team could maintain.

The redesigned public site and intranet paths shipped for an audience of 20+ communicators across four units. Intranet navigation went from 11 items to 8.

These are structural results. Given more time, here is what else I would look at to measure success:

Support requests. I tracked Comms team requests related to finding assets before and after launch: a 30% decrease so far. That's a short window, though, so I'd want to keep tracking before treating it as conclusive.

Find-time. Repeat the same retrieval tasks from testing before and after launch, to see whether people find files faster.

Consolidation holding up. Check whether the 11-to-8 navigation and merged categories stayed that way as the Comms and Digital teams added resources.

What I learned

The intranet got the test the public site didn’t.

Know how to adapt within real constraints. The public site only got tested with admins because of our timeline. I knew that was a gap, but there wasn’t time to go back before launch, so I planned to revisit it and track key measurements to guide future iterations.

Apply the lesson while it’s still avoidable. When I moved onto the intranet, I pushed to test with communicators before we settled on a structure. That helped surface insights we might not have caught otherwise.