Structural Models & Information Architecture
The following diagrams illustrate how the site’s information architecture evolved from an organically grown structure to a clearer, user-oriented model.
Previous IA
Revised IA
Strategy, information architecture, and service design work for an academic public-interest initiative navigating growth, complexity, and accessibility requirements.
Impact snapshot:
Established a scalable information hierarchy for multiple audiences aligned with institutional complexity.
The Institute for Law, Innovation & Technology (iLIT) supports students, faculty, and external partners working at the intersection of law, technology, and public interest. As the initiative expanded, the site grew organically, leading to unclear navigation, overlapping content, and difficulty understanding how different programs related to one another. This work focused on bringing clarity and structure to the platform so users could more easily understand iLIT’s purpose, offerings, and pathways for engagement, while creating a foundation that could support future growth.
I worked as an embedded UX designer, supporting iLIT through a period of growth and change. My role focused on UX strategy, information architecture, and service design, collaborating closely with faculty, program leadership, and technical partners. In this context, I often worked directly with non-design stakeholders, helping translate evolving goals and complex content into clear, user-centered structure.
This work took place within an academic, public-interest environment with evolving priorities and limited access to analytics or formal user research infrastructure. The site needed to support a wide range of audiences and programs while remaining manageable for non-design stakeholders responsible for content updates. Timelines were shaped by academic calendars and program milestones, which required prioritizing clarity, structure, and accessibility over exhaustive validation or long discovery cycles.
The primary challenge was not visual inconsistency, but a lack of clear structure to support how users understood and navigated iLIT’s offerings. As content and programs expanded, information was organized around internal initiatives rather than user goals, making it difficult for visitors to quickly understand what iLIT does, who it serves, and how different efforts connect.
Users were required to interpret dense content and infer relationships between programs, which increased cognitive load and made it harder to identify relevant pathways for engagement. Without clearer hierarchy and grouping, even well-written content became difficult to scan and orient around, particularly for first-time visitors.
Formal usability testing and analytics were limited at this stage, so design decisions were informed by a combination of qualitative and structural signals. These included conversations with faculty and program leadership, reviews of existing content and navigation patterns, and common questions received by iLIT staff from students and partners.
Additional signals came from accessibility heuristics, content audits identifying duplication and ambiguity, and comparative review of similar academic and public-interest initiatives. Together, these inputs consistently pointed toward the need for clearer hierarchy, more intentional grouping of information, and navigation aligned to user goals rather than internal structure.
The strategy focused on reducing cognitive load by clarifying how iLIT’s programs and initiatives related to one another and by aligning site structure more closely with user goals. Rather than expanding navigation or adding new content, decisions prioritized consolidation, clearer grouping, and more intentional hierarchy.
Key decisions included redefining top-level navigation to reflect primary audience needs, grouping related programs to reduce duplication and ambiguity, and establishing consistent page structures so users could more easily scan and orient themselves across the site. Page structure models were used to test and align on content order and emphasis before moving into detailed layout work.
Together, these decisions shifted the experience from one that required interpretation to one that more clearly communicated purpose, scope, and pathways for engagement.
The following diagrams illustrate how the site’s information architecture evolved from an organically grown structure to a clearer, user-oriented model.
To synthesize how users, content, and institutional processes interacted across the experience, I created a service blueprint to surface friction points and identify opportunities for structural clarity.
This work resulted in a clearer, more coherent structural foundation for the iLIT website. Programs and initiatives were easier to understand in relation to one another, and stakeholders had a shared framework for organizing and maintaining content as the initiative continued to grow.
By prioritizing hierarchy, grouping, and consistent page structure, the site became easier to scan and orient around, particularly for first-time visitors. Internally, the clarified structure reduced ambiguity around how new content should be introduced, supporting more confident decision-making and smoother collaboration across teams.
With additional time and resources, the next phase of this work would focus on validating and refining the structural decisions already in place. This would include lightweight usability testing with students and partners to confirm navigation clarity and page structure, particularly for first-time visitors.
Additional steps would include establishing simple content governance guidelines to help maintain consistency as new programs are introduced, and implementing analytics to better understand how users move through the site over time. Together, these efforts would support continued iteration while preserving the clarity and structure established in this phase.
This strategy and IA work laid the foundation for the UI design, accessibility improvements, and CMS implementation that followed.
→ From Strategy to Shipping: Accessible UI Design & CMS Implementation for iLIT