USF System Consolidation
Overview
Florida Legislature passed regulation requiring all 3 USF universities (Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota-Manatee) to become one university with 3 campuses. I was tasked with the moving the two separate university sites into one site’s content management system. This was a project that took a year of planning as it required design, user experience, and new content planning.
Discovery and Competitive Analysis Stage
The most obvious place to start with a project of this scale is studying precedent. There is almost always somebody before you that has done it well, and you can learn from those people. We scoured the higher education sites small and large to find which universities with a similar satellite campuses were doing well. My team and myself studied a narrowed down list of universities and documented what we liked and didn’t like along with what worked well and what didn’t. Read the study below:
USF Consolidation Competitive Analysis
Content Inventory and Design Planning
In order to migrate the 50k plus pages of the two satellite campuses, first we had to do a full content inventory. There were strict limitations on content as the university’s accreditation was dependent on passing standards of The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. Once we knew what content we would need to keep we started planning user-centered design for use of the two new sites in relation to the overall USF main site. I worked with the developers to get the templates in place and tested them with user testing to come up with a final sitemap for both sites (see the content inventory and sketch sitemap below). After a project plan was in place, I managed a group of content contributors to meet the deadline for migrating the content into the new templates.
Old Site Content Inventory and New Taxonomy/Site Structure
Final Site Launch
After a year of design and planning, we launched the new sites on July 1, 2020. You can see the transformation below and check out the St. Pete live site.
Old USF St. Pete and Sarasota Sites
Final Site at Launch
Check out the St. Pete campus live site
