Led the UX strategy and product design for NSU's SharkLink portal migration, helping turn a complex technical move into a clearer, more usable experience for 30,000+ active users.
This project is a proud initiative of NSU's Office of Innovation and Information Technology (OIIT). The project was expertly directed by Marc Malo, Product Owner from IT, whose guidance was pivotal in driving the project forward. I worked under the supervision of James Drew, Director of Innovation, ensuring that innovative solutions were at the forefront of our efforts. All of this was achieved under the overarching leadership of Greg Suarez, whose vision and support were crucial to the project's success.
When I joined the SharkLink project at Nova Southeastern University, the portal had already been serving students, faculty, and staff for more than seven years.
The original plan was a technical migration to Pathify, led by IT. The roadmap focused on moving services, integrations, APIs, links, and content into the new platform.
But once we started looking closer, it became clear that the real challenge went beyond migration. It was UX.
The old portal had years of accumulated issues: confusing navigation, scattered content, user complaints, department requests, support feedback, and a structure that no longer matched how people actually used the portal.
On top of that, Pathify introduced a completely different platform model. The old portal structure was not directly compatible with the new system. We could not simply move everything over and expect it to work.
So the project became more than a migration. It became a chance to rethink how SharkLink should work for students, staff, faculty, departments, and content owners inside a new product paradigm.
This project is a proud initiative of NSU's Office of Innovation and Information Technology (OIIT). The project was expertly directed by Marc Malo, Product Owner from IT, whose guidance was pivotal in driving the project forward. I worked under the supervision of James Drew, Director of Innovation, ensuring that innovative solutions were at the forefront of our efforts. All of this was achieved under the overarching leadership of Greg Suarez, whose vision and support were crucial to the project's success.
From the beginning, we had strong access to data and people.
We reviewed surveys, customer service feedback, previous user complaints, stakeholder suggestions, and department-level insights. We also worked closely with content owners, who often understood the real friction better than anyone. They knew what users asked for, what was hard to find, what content was outdated, and where the system was breaking down in daily use.
That access was possible because of the new direction behind the project. It allowed us to listen properly before making decisions.
The problem was not that SharkLink lacked functionality. The problem was that the experience had become hard to navigate, hard to maintain, and hard to adapt.
Pathify gave NSU a more modern platform, but it also forced a new way of thinking. Widgets, content areas, integrations, and department pages all had to be reconsidered within the new system's constraints.
The risk was obvious: we could migrate the old problems into a new platform.
Our job was to avoid that.
Together with James Drew, Director of Innovation, I helped bring the UX findings to leadership and advocate for a broader direction.
We needed more than a successful migration. We needed a better product experience.
That shift changed the questions we were asking.
Not just: "Can this be moved?"
But: "Does this make sense for the user?" "What does this department actually need to communicate?" "What can students find quickly?" "What needs to be simplified?" "What does Pathify allow, and where do we need to work within its limits?"
That became the foundation of the work.
When I joined, design had been scoped pretty narrowly: help design the portal.
But the real need was bigger. The team needed UX strategy, information architecture, research, content structure, widget definition, and a way to translate decisions into something engineering and QA could actually build and validate.
The timeline was already moving. Engineering could not stop while discovery happened.
So we adjusted the workflow.
Instead of treating design as a final layer, we created space for discovery and delivery to happen in parallel. This gave us room to test assumptions, work with content owners, validate decisions with students, and still keep the migration moving.
To keep the project moving, we introduced a more advanced dual-track workflow.
Engineering continued working on the migration, integrations, and platform setup, while design moved ahead on discovery, research, usability feedback, information architecture, widget definition, and stakeholder alignment.
The key was making discovery move slightly ahead of delivery.
That gave the team enough time to understand the problem, define the right direction, and document decisions before engineering had to build. Documentation became the bridge between both tracks. It captured what we were learning, what had been decided, what the platform could support, and what engineering and QA needed to validate.
This helped us move faster without losing context.
Instead of waiting until everything was built to find problems, we could clarify decisions earlier, reduce ambiguity, and keep the work aligned across design, engineering, QA, stakeholders, and content owners.
.webp)
We started with the Colleges section, one of the most content-heavy parts of the portal.
Each college had its own needs, content, and internal logic. But the experience needed to become easier to use, easier to edit, and realistic within Pathify's limitations.
That was the goal:
Easy to use. Easy to edit. Possible to maintain.
Working with content owners and the content/front-end team, we mapped what each college needed, where users were getting stuck, and what structure would be sustainable after launch.
That led us to a single-column layout.
It was a simple decision, but a good one. It worked better inside the platform, gave users a clearer path, and made the content easier for teams to manage.
Pathify already provided the base dashboard experience. The challenge was not to design the dashboard from scratch, but to move NSU's widgets, services, and integrations into a completely new portal model.
That meant rethinking how each widget should work using the new platform capabilities: reordering, resizing, customization, content hierarchy, integration logic, and user permissions. At the same time, we had to improve the experience using feedback from students, content owners, stakeholders, and support teams.
To help engineering move faster, and to give QA a clearer way to validate the work, we created a modular widget system.
The system worked like a set of building blocks. Each widget could be defined through shared rules around size, behavior, content, states, responsiveness, and implementation needs. This gave design and engineering a common language, and gave QA a clearer way to test what had been designed.
The early collaboration with engineering and content teams was key. It allowed us to test the logic, prove the patterns, and build a foundation we could reuse later.
As more departments became involved, that shared language became essential. It helped us work with each stakeholder group more efficiently, improve the functionality of their widgets, and keep the overall experience consistent without treating every request as a completely new problem.
By shifting the work from a straight technical migration to a product-minded UX process, we helped SharkLink become clearer, more flexible, and easier to use.
The new experience addressed long-standing issues around navigation, content structure, department visibility, and daily access to key services.
It also gave the team a better way to work.
The process was not perfect or frictionless. There were a lot of moving parts, and we had to keep learning while the project was already in motion. But the team came together around a shared goal: make the portal better for the people using it every day.
The project launched within the original timeline and budget. Post-launch surveys showed a 95 to 97% positive satisfaction rate, and the work was well received by students, stakeholders, and NSU leadership.
The real win was not just launching a new portal.
It was helping the team treat SharkLink as a product experience, not just an IT migration.
The customizable widgets became one of the most important parts of the new SharkLink experience.
They helped departments surface services, updates, tasks, schedules, resources, and quick links in a more useful way.
The design work focused on making each widget clear and purposeful.
What does the user need to know? What action should be obvious? What information matters first? What can be removed?
That simple filter helped keep the interface cleaner and more useful.
The final interface was shaped through research, usability testing, surveys, and ongoing feedback from students, stakeholders, and content owners.
We used that feedback to validate the direction, refine widgets, simplify content, and improve how users moved through the portal.
The goal was not to make SharkLink feel flashy.
The goal was to make it easier to understand, easier to use, and easier to maintain after launch.
