Johns' Hopkins Institute for Education Policy
UX Strategy and Design
Initial Conditions
The Institute's first website was designed internally, with help from a WordPress developer.
As the organization started to grow, they hired a PR consulting firm, and they were advised to simplify their mission down to three main areas of focus, and use these to create a visual identity.
They decided on:
Curriculum
Pluralism
Teacher prep
I was hired for this design work, based on an existing relationship with the founders.
Assessing Organizational Needs
My first job was creating a unified icon set to represent JHIEP's three areas of focus. While this process was underway, I was able to drive discussions to determine the organization's other needs. These included:
A website restructure based on the areas of focus
Consolidation and expansion of existing pages to fit a new site hierarchy
Flexible design patterns for use on future pages
Support for a labor-intensive project to host a series of policy documents
Support for digital and print collateral, including assets and design services
Areas of Focus
ICON DESIGN
From four sets of icons, one was approved, and after several more rounds of revision, it was finalized and accepted.
Since the initial redesign, these Area of Focus icons have spawned a family of 4+ other icons representing various initiatives.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
In parallel to the icon design process, the site hierarchy was completely reworked to foreground these three Areas of Focus. This required multiple reviews with the stakeholders, ensuring that all their objectives were highly visible and easy to navigate.
Implementing the new site hierarchy called for a general design update
Home page refresh
Developed in a few design iterations with the Institute administration, the new home page design features the new Areas of Focus icons, the most recent briefings from the Institute, and a rotating banner image that can be managed by the faculty, or by the designer on their behalf.
Layouts with clear patterns
A significant majority of the Institute's website is informational: the nature of their research, the scope of their services, and frequent in-depth analysis of education policy. This requires a strong set of patterns to help structure the various types of content.
Global Pluralism Project
Since 2012, the European Association for Education Law and Policy (ELA) has been publishing a multi-volume study of school systems in more than sixty countries:
Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education (ed. deGroof, Jan and Charles L. Glenn)
As part of the Pluralism area of focus, JHIEP arranged to digitize these documents and provide public access through the JHIEP website.
This required a clean standard format for the documents themselves, and a well-organized, searchable index on a central page.
Integrated Educational Resources
As more initiatives and services were introduced, JHIEP's executive team decided to create a dashboard site for clients to access their reports and data. This development work was handled by a database development business.
My own work on the branding, icons, and site hierarchy were key factors in the dashboard design. As the developers built the backend for JHIEP's services, I provided new icons and added new sections to the website in support of the initiative.
As a leading education non-profit, JHIEP continues to innovate and inform new research and analysis
Rapid Growth of the Organization
JHIEP has grown quickly since the first incarnation of the website
2-3 new initiatives per year
Actively serving dozens of clients in the educational space
Central role of web-based tools
Policy briefs, webinars, and reports are delivered through the website
Global Pluralism is a major one-of-a-kind digital initiative
With the IER dashboard, JHIEP is providing a more advanced digital hub for clients
Since my initial period working for JHIEP, their team has grown, and their web presence has evolved significantly, extending to a wide range of online platforms and formats for disseminating research. Though they've evolved their branding and the website significantly, I am proud of the original work I did with them, which helped lay a foundation for their ongoing success.