The Information Architecture

The original ask from stakeholders was simple: a sticky site navigation available on every page. That was it. We could have built exactly that and called it done.

We didn't, because the research kept pointing at a bigger problem. The current MSU website only surfaces the university-level navigation on the homepage. Once a visitor clicks into a department or college, those global links disappear. For a prospective student trying to get from a college page to financial aid, or from admissions to a specific program, the path breaks. The navigation wasn't designed around how people actually move through a university website. It was designed around how the university thinks about itself.

That's a common failure mode in higher ed web design, and we had plenty of evidence for it. We looked at peer institutions including University of Idaho, Boise State, University of Montana, Miami OH, Harvard College, WashU, University of York, University of Melbourne, and North Dakota State University, among others, pulling only from recently updated and well-maintained systems. The pattern was clear: the institutions doing this well were treating prospective students as the primary navigation audience, not current students or faculty, and they were giving visitors persistent access to key pathways no matter where they landed.

That research became the foundation for a four-layer navigation system.

The global header is persistent and targets prospective students and their families. Search and the global menu live in a single overlay, intentionally. We made that call because we worried that separating them would tank engagement with the navigation. When someone's instinct is to search, we want them to discover navigation options at the same moment. The topics in that global menu came directly from research, not from how MSU internally organizes itself.

The site navigation gives each site's content editors up to seven links, and those links can point anywhere, including external URLs. That was a deliberate call. A campus civil rights page needs to link to a form. An admissions site might want to surface financial aid. Editors know their users better than we do, and the system trusts them with that flexibility.

The Explore This Section component handles discovery at the page level. It dynamically surfaces the current page's children, or siblings if there are no children, with a maximum of nine visible. It substitutes for a sidebar navigation without the maintenance overhead, and it uses the site's own architecture to decide what to show.

Breadcrumbs handle standard wayfinding.

The whole system has been iterative. We went through a lot of variations before landing here, and the shape of it changed significantly once we stopped optimizing for what stakeholders asked for and started optimizing for what visitors actually need. That shift, from internal org logic to user mental models, is where the navigation went from fine to something we're genuinely proud of.