DartmouthCase study
Redesigning the alumni experience and establishing a design system of one of the Ivy League's prestigious institutions
Overview
Project duration
12 months
Services
UX Strategy
UX Audits
Behavioural Analysis
Journey Mapping Information Architecture
My role
Lead UX Designer for the Dartmouth Alumni website redesign, defining UX direction and designing the full end-to-end website in close collaboration with stakeholders.
Brief
Creating a more engaging alumni experience
Dartmouth College identified challenges with its alumni website that were affecting engagement and conversion. The goal of the project was to redesign the platform to create a clearer, more engaging experience that better supports alumni needs and encourages meaningful interaction.
Old homepage for Dartmouth Alumni
Challenges
Fragmentation across content, teams, and platforms
Multiple stakeholders, more than 15 separate alumni websites, and an outdated CMS created a fragmented experience. Inconsistent branding, duplicated content, and limited governance made it difficult to deliver a clear and cohesive alumni journey.
Approach
Defining a clear and scalable UX direction
The project began with a discovery phase focused on understanding content overload, low engagement, and conversion barriers across the alumni website. Through audits, UX analysis, and competitor review, I identified where users struggled to find information and where content and navigation created friction.
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To ground decisions in real user behaviour, I conducted large-scale user research, engaging over 500 alumni through card sorting and tree testing. These insights informed a new information structure and clarified which content mattered most across the alumni journey.
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Building on this foundation, I designed a cohesive design system with modular templates to support consistency, accessibility, and SEO. This system made content updates easier for internal teams while reducing fragmentation across departments and alumni groups.
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In the final phase, I refreshed and reorganised content from more than 15 existing websites. The focus was on improving navigation, strengthening storytelling, and supporting donation journeys, while ensuring the platform remained scalable and manageable over time.
Visuals
Discovery, Structure, and Design System
These visuals highlight stakeholder workshops, UX analysis presentations, research artefacts used to uncover journey friction, wireframes and design system developed to align teams, and define a clear UX direction.
Outcomes
Establishing clarity and consistency across the alumni platform
The redesign delivered a clearer information structure, improved navigation, and a refreshed design system aligned with alumni needs. These changes improved findability, supported SEO and content governance, and created a more consistent and scalable website.
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