University of Melbourne (UNIT) · Education · Case study
Clarifying navigation across a complex university ecosystem
Research, workshops and IA validation helped UNIT decide how navigation should work before a major build.
Project snapshot
Stakeholder alignment, tree testing, and IA direction setting across a complex university environment.
UNIT (Navigation & Information Architecture) needed navigation and IA that could be tested, governed, and funded — not argued in circles. Tino led experience design with the team: IA strategy, facilitation across faculties and central services, and hands-on work through wireframes and prototypes so strategy and validation stayed on one thread.
The University of Melbourne runs one of Australia’s largest and most visible higher-education websites. Growth had produced subdomains, duplicated content, inconsistent navigation, and labels that did not match how people looked for study, research, partnerships, and services. The constraint was organisational complexity showing up as a broken map, not a lack of intent.
Discovery combined interviews, workshops, and analysis of the current estate and sector practice so teams could work from the same picture of what existed. Co-design workshops made trade-offs visible to faculties and central services. Tree testing and usability testing (including Maze) compared baseline and proposed structures; refinement followed what people did in tasks, not preference alone. Playback before build delivered a navigation and IA framework, governance and content recommendations, and stakeholder sessions that gave leadership a credible basis to invest — a direction that could be stewarded, not a pretend final state.
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