Case Study · Sam Houston State University
MySam
Rebuilding a university’s front door around what people actually came to do.
Role
UX Designer
Team
1 designer, 2 student developers
Timeline
2023 – 2024
Outcome
−70% support tickets
The redesigned My Account page
Overview
MySam is SHSU’s front door.
MySam is the university’s one-stop platform where students, faculty and staff find the links and resources they need every day, from class registration to the employee time clock. Behind every link sits a separate system.
20,000+
daily users
3
audiences: students, faculty and staff
Dozens
of separate systems behind it
One front door, dozens of systems behind it
I owned the experience end to end. Student developers built it.
Me
Only designer on the project
2 student developers
Built every page from my specs. I mentored them through it.
20+ departments
Content owners and partners in every workshop and review.
What I owned
Research & audits
Information architecture
UI design & specs
Stakeholder workshops
Content governance
Rollout planning
Problem
When a link broke, users didn’t blame the link. They blamed MySam.
1
Broken & redundant links
A dead link to student finance read as “my account is down.”
2
IA built around departments
New students, faculty and staff couldn’t find things, and filed tickets.
3
Inconsistent UI, poor on mobile
Buttons changed page to page; the sidebar ate small screens.
1
2
3
A lean team, 20+ departments, and an organization that didn’t want a big-bang change.
01
Lean team
One designer and a few student developers. No engineering team.
02
20+ departments
Each owned a piece of MySam and had its own idea of priority.
03
Many audiences, many flows
Students, faculty and staff, each with different tasks.
04
Improve, don’t replace
Leadership wanted it better, not different. A full rebuild was off the table.
Research
I combined audits, department workshops and support tickets to find where people actually got stuck.
Audits
2
Heuristic evaluation and a WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility audit of every page
Departments
20+
in user-task workshops, plus journey mapping with Enrollment Services
User tasks
221
listed by Finance & Operations alone, across 23 offices
Tickets
Katalyst
showed where people actually got stuck
Journey map from the Enrollment Services workshop
Department task needs: Finance & Operations listed 221 tasks across 23 offices
Key insight
MySam was organized around who owned the content, not what people came to do.
MySam was organized around
Who owned the content
Cashier’s Office
People actually came to
What they needed to do
I need to pay my bill
How might we
help students, faculty and staff reach the right tool in as few steps as possible, and trust it works when they get there?
Design
Four principles guided every call I made.
01
Tasks, not departments
Label things by what people want to do.
02
Act, don’t read
A tile beats a paragraph.
03
One pattern, everywhere
Learn it once, use it on every page.
04
Every link earns its place
Fewer links, all of them working.
Decision 01 · Information architecture
I reorganized navigation around the student journey, not around audiences.
Students tab
dissolved into journey stages: Getting Started, Registration, Campus Living, Learning, Graduation
All Users
renamed News, because that is what it held
Employees & Faculty
kept, because their tasks really are different
Before · 8 tabs
All Users
Campus Resources
My Account
Registration
Graduation
Students
Employees
Faculty
After · 10 tabs
News
Campus Resources
My Account
Registration
Campus Living
Learning
Graduation
Getting Started
Employees
Faculty
Decision 02 · Tiles over links
I replaced walls of links with action tiles grouped by task.
Cashier’s Office
Make a Payment
Manage My Cost
View My Info
Before
Paragraphs of links
Contacts in every box
After
One-tap tiles with icons, scannable in seconds
One Need Help section at the bottom
Decision 03 · One consistent system
I built one set of components so every page behaves the same, on any screen.
Collapsible side nav
Bottom nav on mobile
Type scale: 24 / 18 / 16 / 14
One button style, one card style
Palette checked against WCAG 2.1 AA
Decision 04 · Fixing links at the source
Broken links weren’t a design problem. They were an ownership problem.
Before
Everyone edited their own links
Registrar
Financial Aid
Housing
IT Service Desk
Cashier’s Office
MySam
broken links
Every department edited its own links and content. Nobody checked the whole.
After
One owner, one request queue
Registrar
Financial Aid
Housing
IT Service Desk
Cashier’s Office
Katalyst ticket
UX team edits & checks
Only the UX team edits content and links. Departments request changes through a ticket.
Tradeoff: departments lost direct control, and changes take a little longer.
Decision 05 · Page-by-page rollout
Instead of one big relaunch, I shipped page by page, one department at a time.
Every page ran the same loop
Department workshop
Design
Stakeholder review: remove · update · ask
Build
Launch
Impact
Support tickets fell 70% in six months, and tasks took about half the time.
−70%
Support tickets vs. pre-launch baseline
Baseline
100
3 months
−40%
6 months
−70%
2.9 min
average time on core tasks, down from 5.3 min (≈45% faster)
AA
WCAG 2.1 conformance across the redesigned pages
Reflection
Not everything made it, and not everything should have.
Deprioritized
Search
Users wanted it. Building it well needed more time than the rollout allowed, so I deprioritized it. The cost: people who know exactly what they want still have to navigate.
Ruled out
A full revamp
Wasn’t realistic for an organization like this. Change had to come in pieces people could absorb, which limited how far each page could go.
The biggest fix wasn’t on a screen.
Ownership beats pixels.
Governance fixed what redesign alone couldn’t.
Constraints made decisions easier.
A small team and a cautious organization pushed me toward the right rollout.
Design for the builders, too.
If the system is easy to build, it stays consistent.