EEECS Student Hub
A full rebuild of the SharePoint site 1,200 EEECS students rely on - starting from an accessibility brief, not bolting it on at the end.
The site had grown, not been designed.
The EEECS Student Hub had accumulated years of ad-hoc pages, duplicated content, and navigation that reflected whoever last edited it rather than how a student actually looks for information. For most students that's an inconvenience. For neurodivergent students - the group I deliberately centred this rebuild around - inconsistent structure and unclear navigation isn't just frustrating, it's a real barrier to finding what they need.
The brief I set myself: if this site works well for a student who finds unpredictable structure genuinely difficult, it will work well for everyone.
Starting with a full audit
Before touching a single page, I audited the existing site end to end - every page, every navigation path, every piece of duplicated or orphaned content. That audit became the evidence base for every structural decision that followed, rather than working from assumption about what "good navigation" looks like in the abstract.
What changed, and why
From "I can't find it" to "I knew where to look"
- Mapped every existing page against how students actually described what they were looking for
- Restructured the navigation into a single, consistent hierarchy - no more parallel nav trees for the same content
- Rebuilt pages one at a time against that new structure, rather than patching the old one
- Documented ownership and contact tables so the structure stays maintained after handover
- drop in a real screenshot here
What this taught me about product decisions
Designing for the student who finds inconsistent structure hardest didn't produce a "simplified" or "dumbed down" site - it produced a more disciplined one. Every shortcut I might have taken (a duplicate nav item here, an inconsistent label there) had a real cost for someone, which made the trade-offs impossible to hand-wave. That's the version of accessibility I want to carry into product work generally: not a checklist at the end, but a constraint that makes the whole design better.