Increasing engagement with Education Department

The department's flagship website was hindered by confusing navigation, a dated and inaccessible design, and a legacy Cold Fusion platform that lacked a true content management system for staff. With more than 800 pages and 5,000 PDFs behind it, the site had become difficult for both visitors to navigate and editors to maintain.

OHE needed an experienced partner to lead a full redesign and rebuild that would improve usability, accessibility, and long-term sustainability — and to migrate years of legacy content without losing the authoritative resources that Minnesota students and families depend on.

Improved UX

We began our engagement with an extensive review of the current site navigation, and how it was serving (or not serving) the target audience and department goals.

Through user testing, we were able to refine and adjust our recommendations prior to finalizing a much simpler and easy-to-understand approach.

Design Refresh

Building upon state branding guidelines, we introduced a new, more modern look and feel to the website that emphasized greater warmth and human interaction, while providing a calming layout to contrast the content-heavy needs of the client.

As we neared launch, we again conducted usability testing with volunteers, making additional recommendations and adjustments to the design and layout where needed to improve user experience.

Technical Improvements

From a technical standpoint, our team led the client through discovery, identifying the technical and editorial requirements of the project and mapping out how to migrate 800+ pages and 5,000+ PDFs out of their legacy Cold Fusion system.

OHE had an internal developer who planned to take over ongoing site maintenance after launch. Our team worked alongside them throughout the project, sharing Drupal best practices and developer operations so they could confidently carry the site forward.