When I began working on the team that owned the account management tools at IU—like password reset and email forwarding—I was surprised to find there was no navigation between the tools, even though they were all built within the same application. When I inquired about this approach, it was explained that we were "all-in" on the search engine created by the university, and therefore, each application could, and should, stand alone. This seemed to undermine a few basic UX principles like discoverability and the whole concept of information architecture. But the search tool had been deemed a success, and one that other institutions were willing to pay to have as well.

While on the accounts team, I was also a student pursing my Master of Information Science. For an assignment in my information architecture class, I had to create and design an application with multiple hierarchical levels . Naturally, I chose the suite of tools my team owned, wondering if it might validate my sneaking suspicion that users would greatly benefit from something as basic as navigation. Each of the account features was grouped into one of six categories, and a similar interface was applied to make the functionality recognizable across the application. When I presented this concept to my peers in class, I have to say I was surprised at just how well it was received as students expressed their interest for such a tool both during and after my presentation. Certainly, this was some validation for combining tools into a single interface.