UX/UI Design
Rocky View School Division
A thoughtful school division website for students, staff, & parents
Role: Lead UX/UI Designer
Agency: Box Clever (Rally Online)
Client: Rocky View School Division
Rocky View Schools (RVS) is a large Alberta school division encompassing 53 schools and a growing student population. With such a large and diverse user base including students, parents, educators, and administrators, RVS needed a website that was user-friendly with a clear navigation, reflective of its unified brand identity, and scalable to each individual school website while catering to multiple audiences.
As the UX/UI design lead, I was responsible for the full redesign of the division website, while overseeing a team of designers to apply and expand the design into a template that each of the 53 schools would use for their individual websites. The goal was to create a clean, accessible, and consistent digital experience that could serve as a central hub of information for all users.
Discovery & Research
Through stakeholder kickoff meetings, usability testing, and competitor analysis, several key challenges and priorities emerged. With a wide-reaching audience (parents, students, staff, and school administrators) all requiring access to timely and accurate information, an accessible navigation with categorized quick links, a clear search function, and clean page layouts would be key to the success of the website.
It was also imperative we create a unified design that showcased the division branding on the RVS website, while still allowing room for individual school identities to be applied on each of their individual websites.
Pain Points:
Inconsistent layout and navigation making it a challenge for the various user groups to locate important information
Cluttered backend experience with too many content options and styling inconsistencies
Poor search functionality
Limited ability to highlight essential content
Solution
The design solution focused on delivering clarity, consistency, and flexibility in creating a centralized website tailored to the needs of division-level users and administrators, while also being scalable across all school sites.
1. Streamlined Navigation & Information Architecture
We utilized a familiar top-level menu structure to support ease of use while improving overall clarity and accessibility.
Simplified navigation focused on user intent and high-frequency tasks
Featured, categorized quick links clearly labeled for each user group (students, parents, staff)
2. Clean, Approachable Visual Design
The visual system was designed to reflect RVS’s open and friendly brand. With accessible layouts and a focus on clarity, we prioritized function over flash.
Visually, the focus was on a very clean design highlighting impactful hover-based interactions
Flexible homepage sections that allow for highlighting current and timely content such as featured quick links, news, and events
A unified header and footer system that reinforces the division identity and seamlessly scales to individual school sites
A customized Schools & Attendance Areas page to ensure the families of the growing division could locate their correct school catchment areas, and easily find contact information
3. Improved Usability for All Audiences
Taking into account that the division website serves a large and diverse audience, we prioritized:
Clarity, with clean content layouts and a clear information hierarchy.
Accessibility, by completing usability testing in a responsive environment and following industry standard accessibility principles.
A functional design that gave stakeholders and webmasters the tools they required to highlight and feature relevant and important information. All while ensuring that the design patterns were created for use not only across the division website, but that they were scalable for school-level sites as well.
Conclusion
The redesigned Rocky View Schools division website delivers a centralized, accessible, and dynamic website that reflects the growing needs of the division. With improved navigation, smarter search functionality, and a clean visual system, the site provides a reliable and user-friendly experience for families, staff, and students. With a scalable design foundation in place, the division site set the tone for a cohesive digital experience that can extend across all school websites, ensuring consistency across the whole RVS Division.
