Project
MIT has many policies that cover various aspects of working, studying, and living here. A portal website was needed that would enable community members to quickly and accurately find policy information. The two primary employment-related policy manuals—Policies and Procedures (P&P) and the Employment Policy Manual (EPM)—had different owners and often returned duplicate search results, which was confusing to users.
Methodolgy
After meeting with the client team, we recommended design firms with a strong discovery component, knowing that a big challenge would be seamlessly combining the content and structure from two disparate sites into a unified experience. The project was awarded to Stoltze Design (partnering with Debby Levinson for discovery) and Penzias for development. Once the project was underway, we offered insight on the site structure, navigation names, and design.
Results
The search function has a filter to narrow results to P&P or EPM, or users can see all results, which are tagged to indicate the source. The site also includes policy topics—links and resources organized around the most commonly accessed sections of these two manuals. The content of other MIT policy manuals may be brought into the site down the road, rather than just linking to them.