UM College of Pharmacy

This wasn't a facelift. The College of Pharmacy needed a large, complex website designed from the ground up — spanning programs, admissions, research, student life, faculty, news, and giving, for four distinct audiences who each arrive with different intent. I was brought on as the lead designer to own that experience end to end, from research through to the final interface.

A parallel need set the timeline: the site's early-2000s Drupal 7 platform was reaching end-of-life and had to move to WordPress. That migration was real and it drove the schedule, but it sat apart from the day-to-day design work — my focus was the experience itself, and a content model the Marketing & Communications team could actually run.

• A large, sprawling site to rethink whole
• Four audiences, one experience to design
• Confusing menus, poor information architecture
• Essential info like aid and research, hard to find
• A decade of decentralized, off-brand content
• A platform migration setting the clock

Under the surface, the sprawl had a cause. The original site let every department publish and manage its own pages, and over a decade without shared guidelines or brand standards, that autonomy produced a patchwork of visual identities, inconsistent structure, and content that quietly went out of date, weakening both usability and the University's brand. So designing the site from the ground up meant more than screens: it meant giving the college a shared information architecture, a consistent brand system, and a content model many hands could keep on-brand.

I ran stakeholder interviews with faculty, staff, and students, audited the sprawling existing content, and studied the analytics, then pressure-tested the structure with card sorting and first-click testing. One theme was unanimous: the site was hard to navigate. From there, four insights shaped every decision that followed.

Because the redesign was as much about governance as pixels, I also led cross-department UX workshops, bringing faculty, staff, and communications leads into the same room to surface needs, resolve competing priorities, and build shared ownership of the direction before a single page was designed. The output wasn't just artifacts; it was buy-in.

I rebuilt the site's structure around how people actually look for things, not around the org chart. A clear nine-section model replaced the tangle of department-owned menus, and every proposed structure was pressure-tested with card sorting, first-click testing, and one-on-one conversations across the college before it was finalized.

With the structure agreed, I wireframed the key page types, establishing hierarchy, module patterns, and responsive behavior before any visual design. The mobile-first layouts were resolved here, so the system was proven to work at phone width from the start.

The redesign lives inside the University of Michigan's brand, but the college needed its own voice within it. I ran visual explorations to extend that language, refining type, color, and layout into a system that felt unmistakably Michigan yet distinct to Pharmacy, and produced custom-made assets and brand guidelines (typography, graphic elements, iconography, and photography standards) so the identity could scale across hundreds of pages without drifting.

The launched experience: clear wayfinding, a confident brand, and content structured around what each audience came to do.

Mobile wasn't an adaptation; it was the starting point. The same system holds down to phone width, where a growing share of prospective students first meet the college.

A public university site has to work for everyone. The redesign went through full WCAG testing (color contrast, keyboard navigation, semantic structure, and screen-reader behavior), baked into the templates so accessibility holds as the Comms team adds new content over time.

The strongest outcome wasn't a page or a platform; it was a way of working. Designing the site from the ground up, as one end-to-end experience rather than a patchwork of department pages, gave the college a shared model for telling its story consistently, a team empowered to run it, and results that showed up where they matter most: in applications, in reach, and in recognition.