Design & Technology Working in Tandem Boise State is a bold institution with rigorous academics and a rich campus culture serving a diverse student, staff, and alumni population. They needed a design system that supported and reflected their vibrancy and could propel them into the future. Beyond the brand and design work, they needed a technical infrastructure that would enable them to manage their organization at scale, but was also flexible enough to allow for the ever-shifting and evolving goals and objectives that are the reality of higher education. A focus on consistency, governance, security, and accessibility in both the visual and technical endeavors guided our work throughout. Hundreds of Sites Living Under One Roof WordPress multisite is a powerful tool often used to manage large websites that have different departments underneath a parent site. While it’s extremely powerful, and flexible—it is susceptible to fracturing quality and management hurdles if it’s not built on a strong foundation with checks in place to ensure quality is maintained. We rebooted their multisite from the ground up and put in place a series of governance and structured content creation tools. This will ensure that content creators and editors, regardless of skill or experience, can manage their portion of the site up to the standards set by Boise’s communications team. When designing tools for big organizations like Boise, we always want to position the “right way to do something” to also be the “easiest way to do something.” Applying this philosophy to content management in a franchised organization ensures that as the platform evolves over time, it does so retaining an exceptionally high degree of execution. How our tools get used, and by whom are key parts of every project we tackle. When we revisit our projects years later, we’re pleased to see that they look as tight and polished as the day they launched. Design, Brand Platform, & Consistency Boise State needed more than just a rebooted digital platform. Their brand needed to evolve, and the digital system was just one place where that evolution would be seen. We often find ourselves in this middle ground between brand strengthening and digital execution—the overlap creates interesting opportunities and better execution on both fronts. While more traditional design or brand agencies tend to look at design work abstracted from execution, with head nods towards business cards or letterheads, we knew Boise needed much more than that. We built out a full design system that could support their brand growth and execution needs. This system governs and supports all execution. It is bold and vibrant in the way that Boise State is and aspires to be. It’s also flexible, extensible, and can evolve gracefully over time to serve the organization as it grows. Lots of design agencies can do that work. But it doesn’t stop with the creation of the design system. Execution and follow-through are where most organizations fall short in the digital space because their tools are not equipped to output content at that aspirational level. Most design systems are handed off as sadly forgotten pdf’s that individual editors struggle to implement with outdated and clunky tools. It’s no surprise that quality atrophies quickly. The content creation tools that we built into Boise’s platform are literally a digital extension of the design system ensuring that anything created on the web looks and functions according to their goals. Embracing Accessibility With the Spirit of Inclusiveness Boise State didn’t want to just check the accessibility box, they wanted to set a new standard for accessibility across their platform. Accessibility and inclusion isn’t a “thing you do.” It’s a guiding principle that starts with strategy and runs through design and development at every step. Throughout the project, accessibility testing was a key acceptance criteria. Boise State teamed up with Siteimprove for real user and automated testing that ensured the new site had high conformance marks across the board. The Boise State team didn’t stop at design, development, and automated testing. They acknowledged the effort and time it takes to strive towards conformance and they now have a continual accessibility improvement plan to serve their visitors. That kind of continual commitment to accessibility is something that we want to see in all of our clients. Way to go Boise State team! Intentional Navigation & Search When you’re building web properties at scale, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is facilitating users finding the specific content they need. This kind of wayfinding manifests in two ways: navigation and search. Challenges around navigation and search are magnified by WordPress multisite—leaving an opportunity to rethink traditional paradigms to both. Our design and development teams imagined a new approach to generating and presenting navigation tools to the end-user that adapts based on where the user is in the site, where they came from, and where they might be headed. To compliment our robust navigation solutions, we integrated with Cludo, an AI-powered search engine to ensure that results were always of peak relevance for the end user. Sometimes it’s best to build from scratch, sometimes it’s better to leverage existing tools—it’s our job to know which.