Universities are uniquely difficult clients. Royal Holloway isn't a single organisation with a single set of priorities. It's a constellation of faculties, departments, administrative teams, student services, and senior leadership, each with legitimate and sometimes competing claims on what the digital presence should do and who it should serve. Getting meaningful alignment across that structure, without letting the project be pulled apart, required sustained facilitation and a strategic framework that all parties could genuinely orient around.

The design problem itself was genuinely complex. Serving prospective students, current students, academic staff, researchers, and visitors on a single coherent platform, when those audiences have fundamentally different needs, different mental models, and different reasons for being on the site. The central challenge was building an information architecture that served all of them without compromising the experience for any one group.

The Decisions That Mattered

Before a single design decision was made, I ran structured workshops with representatives from across the university to build the brief collectively. Given the breadth of stakeholder opinions, I knew that starting design without a shared foundation would mean relitigating the same questions in every review meeting. Having a documented, collectively owned brief meant that later decisions could be anchored to something everyone had already signed up to. It sounds like basic process. In a stakeholder environment this complex, it was essential.

The most consequential call I made on this project was to prioritise the prospective student journey explicitly and formally. A university website that tries to serve everyone equally usually ends up serving nobody particularly well. I made that decision in writing, presented it to stakeholders, and got it agreed before the design work began. Every other audience was served, but not at the expense of that primary flow. Securing buy-in for that hierarchy across an institution with competing departmental priorities was itself a significant piece of work, and one I treated as seriously as the design itself.

I also set accessibility as a design standard from day one rather than a compliance exercise applied at the end. For a public sector institution WCAG compliance isn't optional, but the way it's approached makes an enormous difference to the result. I built type scales, colour contrast, focus states, and heading structures into the design system from the outset, so that compliance was a natural output of good design rather than a set of corrections made under pressure at the end.

Finally, I made sure the university could maintain what we built after we left. A rebrand only holds if the institution can apply it consistently without the agency in the room. I delivered a component-based design system with clear documentation and usage guidance that Royal Holloway's internal teams could build from and adapt independently, without needing to come back to us every time they needed something new.