Here's the thing about a broken navigation: most users don't file a ticket. They don't even complain. They just hit search.

When I pulled our analytics, the numbers were hard to ignore. 18% of all clicks on the homepage, went straight to the search icon. Not to Admissions. Not to Academics. To an empty search bar.

That's not a user preference. That's a red flag.

I remember sitting with the heatmap data, watching red blooms cluster around the search bar.

We partnered with Carnegie HigherEd (our marketing agency) to conduct card sorting. We gave students 42 cards, each representing a page or task, and asked them to organize the cards however made sense to them. No right answers. Just their instincts.

The results were telling.

‍For prospective students, the priority was clear. Admission tasks like Apply, Undergraduate Admission, and Visit topped the list. Academics followed closely, with specific schools like Humanities, Music Theatre and Dance, and Health Sciences ranking highest. Life at IC, including Residential Life and Campus Life, rounded out what mattered most.

‍The bottom of the list was just as revealing. Students consistently placed Make a Gift, Giving, At a Glance, Directions, and Office of the President into categories labeled "Don't Need" or "Unsure."

The takeaway was undeniable. Students don't speak in internal jargon. "IC Resources" meant nothing to them. They wanted direct paths to schools, admission tasks, and student life. Everything else was noise.

User research gave us direction. Then reality sets in.

As we reviewed Carnegie's findings and were redoing our information architecture with stakeholders, one issue kept surfacing: we have hundreds of orphan pages on ithaca.edu. Pages that exist, have valuable content, but have no navigation path. Users can only find them if they have a direct link or search Google.

The conversation quickly spiraled. Should we fix all the orphan pages? Build navigation paths for everything? The list kept growing.

We realized we were looking at the IA for every piece of content on the entire site. That meant thousands of pages, complex permission settings across dozens of content managers, and a content migration effort that would take years, not months.

Stakeholders wanted to solve everything at once. But we had to be honest: that wasn't feasible. Not for this iteration.

We made a hard decision. We narrowed our focus to the main pain point: the primary, utility, and footer navigation. Not every orphan page. Not every content migration. Just the navigation.

This meant leaving some good content unfindable for now. But it also meant we could actually ship something this year.

From our research, Students overwhelmingly wanted Career Exploration and Residential Life under a banner that matched their mental model. We killed the vague "IC Resources" label entirely and built a dedicated Student Life section.

Career Exploration, which had over 128,000 annual views, moved front and center. We grouped everything by student journey rather than internal organization.

The five schools were technically findable under Academics as second level items. But that was it. There were plenty of other resources that logically belonged under Academics, the Registrar, the Course Catalog, Academic Support, but they had no home there. They were scattered across other sections or buried as orphan pages with no navigation path at all.

This lack of discoverability meant students had to already know exactly where something lived or fall back on search. The Academics section looked like it only contained the five schools, so most users never realized all the supporting resources even existed.

We changed that completely. We transformed Academics into a true hub that brings together everything a student might need for their academic journey.

Programs and Pathways became a new one stop hub for students who are undecided or want to explore broadly before committing to a specific school. Graduate and Professional Studies finally got a clear home. The Academic Calendar and Registrar, two of the most visited pages on the entire site with over 680,000 views, were pulled out of the shadows. The Course Catalog, previously only accessible as an external link, was integrated directly. We also added the Academic Support Center and Office of the Provost.

The vague "Tools" dropdown became "Connect" with myIC, Canvas, Engage, and Intercom. Visit expanded to show Campus Map, Directions, and Virtual Tour. We added a "Give" CTA to serve alumni and donors, who drove 5 percent of homepage clicks.

We rebuilt the footer into three clear columns covering campus resources, key actions, and contact information. Safety and Emergency were merged. Campus Services replaced the remnants of IC Resources.

Before launch, we partnered with Carnegie for another round of testing. This time we ran a tree test with 43 prospective and 25 current students. Tree testing strips away visual design to test just the labels and structure.

The average success rate was 60 percent, landing in the "good" range per Nielsen Norman Group benchmarks. Directness averaged 65 percent.

Students successfully found scholarships and grants 81 percent of the time. The academic catalog was clear at 77 percent. Career support landed at 68 percent, though we added a cross link from Academic Support Center just to be safe.

Finding the Film program under the Park School of Communications was harder than expected. Only 31 percent of students succeeded, with most prospective students looking under Programs and Pathways instead of Our Schools. We decided to keep both paths active rather than forcing one.The hardest task was finding graduation ceremony information, with only 16 percent success. Students looked in Student Life or the Academic Calendar. We responded by cross linking Annual Events under both Academics and Student Life.The verdict was clear. Our structure was good but not perfect. We made cross linking tweaks rather than a full redesign.