AWith a mission to attract the most promising students to shape them into visionary scholars, innovative educators, and creative leaders to provide global leadership and innovation in graduate education, Harvard Keith C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts And Sciences needed help to redesign the site in a way that wasn’t frilly and full of excess nonsense but was both transactional and delightful.

The GSAS marketing & communications team came to us because they needed help to determine a new site architecture that would support key audiences in finding what they need on the site in an intuitive manner. As we began talking with them about how tightly woven site architecture and design are, we decided it made sense to tackle both those pieces of the project together.

We faced two major challenges on this project: The first, balancing the well-established Harvard brand standards with a revitalized and modern approach to create an updated website experience that better reflects what it’s like to attend the Harvard GSAS today – and second, presenting many different types of content and information, together, in a cohesive and clear way curated for each of the top user groups that visit the website.

We knew, going into the project, that we needed to do something completely different with navigation; during our discovery phase, nearly everyone we spoke with expressed some level of frustration with the existing navigation and the inability to find things where they expected them to be. We employed a number of tactics, starting with a thorough site audit, to determine both site architecture and navigation options to create the best, most intuitive, pathways through the site.

The jewel in our crown is the Mega Menu with exposed navigation options – we used this treatment to help site visitors understand the relationships between types of information as well as indicate to them the depth of the site.

The finished site won 7 awards and was a Webby Honoree (which is a pretty big deal in the tech world.)