Universities are uniquely difficult clients. Royal Holloway is not a single organisation with a single set of priorities — it is a constellation of faculties, departments, administrative teams, student services, and senior leadership, each with legitimate claims on what the digital presence should do and who it should serve. Getting meaningful alignment across that structure, without allowing the project to be pulled in too many directions simultaneously, required sustained facilitation and a clear strategic framework that all parties could orient around.

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The design problem itself — serving prospective students, current students, academic staff, researchers, and visitors on a single coherent platform — was genuinely complex. These audiences have fundamentally different needs, different mental models, and different reasons for being on the site. Building an information architecture that served all of them without creating a fragmented or compromised experience for any one group was the central design challenge throughout.

Key Decisions

Establishing a shared brief before starting design. Given the breadth of stakeholder opinions, we ran a series of structured workshops with representatives from across the university early in the project to establish agreed design principles and audience priorities. This wasn't just good process — it was essential politics. Having a documented, collectively owned brief meant that later design decisions could be anchored to something everyone had signed up to, rather than relitigated from scratch in every review.

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Prioritising prospective students as the primary audience without alienating others. A university website tries to serve everyone and often ends up serving no one particularly well. We made a deliberate, documented decision to prioritise the prospective student journey as the primary use case — the one that most directly affected Royal Holloway's competitive position and recruitment outcomes. Every other audience was served, but not at the expense of that primary flow. Getting stakeholder buy-in for this hierarchy was itself a significant piece of work.

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Treating accessibility as a design quality standard, not a compliance checklist. WCAG compliance for a public sector institution isn't optional, but the way it's approached makes an enormous difference to the end result. We embedded accessibility standards into the design system from the outset — type scales, colour contrast, focus states, heading structures — so that compliance was a natural output of good design rather than a set of corrections applied at the end.

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Building a system the university could maintain. A rebrand only holds if the institution can apply it consistently after the agency leaves. We invested in a component-based design system with clear documentation and usage guidance — one that Royal Holloway's internal teams could build from and adapt without needing to return to the agency for every new page or campaign.