Smart Design For Harvard: From Chaos to Clarity
CLIENT: Harvard Kennedy School
The Harvard Kennedy School is a higher education institution focused on public policy and government - and a community of thousands of students, staff, and faculty. Known for producing innovative leaders, the school was struggling to provide a digital hub that met the community’s needs. The current intranet was outdated and unintuitive. As a legacy tool, it was designed around the school’s departmental structure, meaning users needed to know which department authored a resource in order to find it. That meant wasted time for students wondering if information about cross registration was published under Courses or Registrar.
Search was found to be a primary method of finding content on the site. Yes Yes Know performed usability research on the display of search results to ensure optimal transfer of information.
This complexity made navigation frustrating and led to questions about the quality and trustworthiness of the intranet’s resources. HKS brought in Yes Yes Know as a strategic design partner to rethink the structure of the intranet and align it to user needs. Our team conducted extensive user research to ensure the next iteration of the platform was intuitive, useful, and inspired trust. Through card sorting and tree testing exercises, we uncovered key audience mental models, motivations, and pain points - like the fact that users had minimal understanding of departmental structure. These insights informed a user-focused information architecture (IA) that replaced the rigid departmental-based system with a more intuitive, needs-based approach.
“It is not ‘Yes, Yes, No’ - it is ‘Yes, Yes, Yes!’”
Yes Yes Know designed page templates and core components to establish a consistent visual identity for the platform, while collaborating with the HKS Accessibility team. Our team facilitated ongoing conversations with stakeholders across the school to ensure the intranet addressed user needs, met development timelines, and aligned with business objectives.
In less than two weeks, the YYK team designed a plan and completed our research. Then the redesigned intranet launched in beta, allowing for real-world testing and continuous improvement. By prioritizing user feedback and making data-driven enhancements, we gradually rebuilt trust in the platform’s reliability and usability. Today, the new intranet provides a seamless, accessible, and user-friendly experience, empowering the HKS community to efficiently find and engage with the information they need.
