IRPO
A public institution's website redesigned around the people it serves
- WordPress
- Government
- Information Architecture
Overview
IRPO manages pre-university education development in Sarajevo Canton, coordinating teacher training and professional development. The original site buried essential resources under institutional language, making it hard for educators to find what they needed.
The challenge
Government and education websites share a common failure mode: they organize information by how the institution thinks about itself. Teachers needed knowledge of internal structure to find workshops, forms, and documents. The redesign had to improve usability while preserving institutional credibility.
The solution
Navigation was restructured around visitor needs rather than departmental hierarchy. Primary sections highlight Upcoming Programs, Publications, Career Guidance, and Online Tools. The design pairs accessible layouts for varying digital literacy with authoritative typography and restrained color.
Outcome
- Navigation centered on user tasks, not org structure
- Four primary content sections for discoverability
- Accessible design accommodating diverse user capabilities
- Maintainable templates standardizing institutional content
User Journey Analysis
Actor: Primary school teacher looking for a professional development workshop
Googles 'IRPO seminari 2024' — finds the site with unclear navigation
Previous structure mapped to IRPO's internal departments — not to what teachers actually need to find
Clicks through 4 sections before finding upcoming workshops
Task analysis showed 'Upcoming Programmes' was the #1 task for 80% of visitors — now the primary nav item
Reads workshop listing: date, duration, credit hours, application deadline
Programme cards structured to show all decision-relevant information without requiring a click-through
Applies via embedded form — no account creation required
External form replaced with an embedded solution — no context-switching to complete the application
Receives confirmation email with programme details and a calendar invite
Automated confirmation with calendar attachment — measurably reduces no-show rates
UX Artifacts
Government IA Anti-Pattern Audit
- Anti-pattern 1
- Departments as primary navigation — teachers don't know which dept. runs which workshop
- Anti-pattern 2
- Acronym-heavy copy — 'IRPO/PK/EDU' is meaningless to external visitors
- Anti-pattern 3
- News as default homepage — visitors have tasks, not just curiosity
- Anti-pattern 4
- PDFs as primary document format — inaccessible on mobile devices
- Anti-pattern 5
- No search function — site relies on perfect navigation to be useful
- All five addressed
- Every anti-pattern resolved in the redesign
Task-Based Navigation Redesign
- Previous nav
- About / Activities / Projects / News / Contact — org-structure model
- New nav
- Upcoming Programmes / Publications / Career Guidance / Online Tools / News
- Rationale
- 4 of 5 new items correspond directly to the top user tasks from analytics
- Depth
- Upcoming Programmes → filter by level + date + topic → apply in 3 clicks max
- News deprioritised
- Retained but not primary — news is produced for IRPO, not for teachers
- Search added
- Available across all content sections — fallback for unfamiliar visitors
next frame →
Persuava
Redesigning an AI content platform that went on to raise VC
