Conducted 8 stakeholder interviews (faculty, admissions, advancement), competitive analysis of 6 peer business schools, and technical discovery with development team to understand Drupal constraints.

• Key Insights

• Users needed dual filtering: course type AND term simultaneously

• Faculty wanted promotional control through shareable individual URLs

• Filter selections must persist when navigating to/from course details

• Text-first design with optional media performed better than image-heavy layouts

• Different course types served different purposes requiring unique value propositions

• Scalability was critical - 10 courses growing to 40+ within 18 months

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Information Architecture Strategy
The information architecture needed to solve two distinct problems: enabling user discovery through filtering, and allowing faculty to promote individual courses. I designed a dual-structure approach using Drupal's taxonomy system that would automatically populate filtered views while generating unique URLs for each course.

Taxonomy Structure
Created a hierarchical taxonomy with Course Type (Executive Education, Professional Certificates, Individual Courses, Workshop Series), Term (Spring A/B, Summer, Fall A/B), and additional tags for subject area, format, duration, and prerequisites. This structure enabled automated course population, dynamic URL generation, and multiple filtering combinations without manual page creation.