Design study · Public research university · Michigan
A research university, redesigned around its people
A university redesign concept whose deliverable is not a set of pages but a live, accessible component library that the pages happen to be built from.
Redesign concept responding to RFP #00307. Facts come from the university's published site; this is not the official Oakland University website.
- University website design
- Live design system
- Program finder
- Audience pathways
- Ask surface
- WCAG 2.2 AA
Oakland University — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
A university website is not one site; it is hundreds of sub-sites maintained by colleges, departments, and offices who will never share a content calendar. Redesigning the homepage changes almost nothing about what a prospective student actually encounters two clicks later. And the central discovery task — finding a program among well over a hundred — is typically buried under audience navigation that assumes the visitor already knows whether they are undergraduate, graduate, or transfer.
The approach
The design system is the deliverable. The entire concept runs on one accessible component library, published as a live page on the site itself rather than a static style guide, so the governance problem has an answer that survives past launch: departments build from components rather than inventing pages. On top of it, audience-first pathways and a finder across 168 programs handle the discovery task directly, and an Ask surface answers plain questions. Because the university's delivery stack is locked to its existing CMS with no migration, the work is deliberately scoped as design system plus templates rather than a platform change.
The result
Nine routes covering academics, admissions, governance, news, brand, accessibility, a published design system, and an Ask surface, built to WCAG 2.2 AA — above the 2.1 AA the RFP requires.
Have something similar in mind?
Need a civic tool with this shape?
Stoa designs and ships resident-facing tools, internal workflows, and public service interfaces that stay fast, legible, and accessible from day one.