The University of Virginia School of Law is America’s second oldest continuously operating law school, offering a world-renowned academic curriculum to future leaders, including lawyers and law professionals.
With UVA Law’s Drupal 7 site approaching its end-of-life date, the Univerisity team engaged Northern to conduct a technical discovery exercise to review the website and create a strategy to migrate it to Drupal 9.
The team requested a design refresh to not only highlight what sets this prestigious institution apart, but also create better experiences for internal and external users with a unified technology ecosystem.
Driving applications and supporting the application process was a secondary priority, as the school regularly receives over 20 times more applications than there are seats available.
The UVA Law website, law.virginia.edu, is a key tool for showcasing the prestigious programming and work of students, faculty and alumni. To continue meeting the changing needs of users, the Drupal site was changed and iterated over time, growing to over 24,000 pages and becoming labour-intensive to maintain as a result.
With this in mind, the majority of the redevelopment project goals had a technical focus, centered around creating a more streamlined, simplified experience for editors, website administrators, staff, and students in Drupal 9.
The Northern team started with an audit of the university’s Drupal 7 site and the architecture that it was built upon, reviewing its configuration to make high-level recommendations for the Drupal 9 implementation.
The following updates were recommended for the new iteration of the website:
Once the audit was complete, Northern started the process of assisting the UVA team in planning their site migration.
With around 24,000 pages of content on the original site, Northern recommended a full content review to reduce the number of pages that needed to be migrated to the new site.
Northern suggested the team follow a two-step process for migration planning.
The first step was to map the source and destination of all content being transferred down to the field and paragraph level to ensure that unique and edge cases were considered before the migration pipeline was created.
The second step was to build the migration pipeline using the Drupal Migrate module.
One of the major technical pain points of the previous version of the site was its speed. A contributor to this was that listing pages (courses, directory, faculty quick guide) used a tabbed display that presented all results (sometimes hundreds of entries) on page load.
In place of this method, Northern introduced a single view that initially loads a small number of results using pagination. The team implemented user-facing search facets and filters to give users a range of search tools and dimensions, allowing them to narrow down their results and find the information they’re searching for, without the lag.
The UVA Law teams were acutely aware of the disjointed nature of the site-building techniques used on their Drupal 7 site, resulting from iterative development over an extended period of time. With 35 content types and many panel, context, and view displays, managing and publishing content was a complicated process, and reducing the content types in use was necessary to simplify content creation.
Both goals were achieved using a combination of 20 optimized content types and a robust library of Paragraphs (also referred to as components) that support a range of predetermined presentation and theming configurations.
This approach was key to empowering content editors to create new, visually interesting, on-brand pages using flexible page layouts and presentations. It also freed up developers’ capacity to focus on more custom development requirements.
The original site used a combination of dedicated content types, taxonomy terms and paths to control editor access to protected information. To streamline the management of protected content and provide more flexibility to editors, Northern used a subsites approach to implement content separation.
The subsites are managed as taxonomy terms which can be applied to chosen content types, with each subsite having its own dedicated menu structure. The functionality was designed to be used by editors and authenticated users for access control using URL alias patterns and filtering.
Northern created four subsites for this project:
Subsites were also used to replace the separate dedicated microsites that were traditionally built using third-party platforms due to timeline and capacity constraints.
Improving data connectivity created significant efficiencies for UVA Law’s content editors. It reduced the need for manual and duplicate content entry, increased filterability and dynamic display, and helped ensure accuracy and timeliness by establishing a strong data and information architecture, in addition to a single source of truth.
To streamline the site’s visual framework and differentiate the UVA School of Law while still keeping it in line with the overarching University of Virginia brand, the team created a style tile that formalized these similarities and differences. The tile established the colours, typography, and other inline style elements, forming the basis for all future design work.
The original site used 47 different menu instances to power its navigation, which Northern recommended reducing from both a technical perspective and for a more consistent approach to menu access and presentation across the site.
There were several opportunities to better align the site menus to provide a better experience for prospective students, intuitive support for students, staff, faculty, and general users.
By making changes to its information architecture, the team improved content accessibility, and increased its findability and content discoverability through navigational and content grouping updates. These changes were complemented by the elimination of presentation barriers that precluded users from accessing the content they required (e.g. non-intuitive hamburger menu).
Together with the UVA team, Northern delivered:
Northern’s collaboration with the University of Virginia Law School not only resulted in a site migration to Drupal 9, but a reimagined user experience for internal and external users alike.
By deeply immersing themselves into the school’s primary drivers, challenges, and goals, the Northern team was able to create a number of tailored solutions that met their needs.
For content editors, the updated website provides the perfect balance of flexibility and predictability to streamline content creation. For students and faculty, the simplified site navigation and search features have created a significant improvement in user experiences.
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