Finance at Cornell

Project Details

Role: Designer & Front-End Developer

Problem

Cornell’s Division of Financial Services supports departments across accounting, payroll, procurement, tax, travel, and sponsored financial services, each with its own dense set of policies, guides, and resources. Visitors are typically task-driven, looking for a specific form or rate, so the challenge was making an unusually large, department-heavy site feel fast and approachable rather than like a maze.

Process

• The client specifically requested that the main navigation feel more like an application, so I designed a persistent, tool-like navigation structure that let users move fluidly between departments and drill into deeply nested subpages without losing their place
• Paired that navigation with audience-based entry points for faculty, staff, and students, giving different visitor types more than one path to relevant content depending on who they are rather than only what department they need

The Outcome

A site that functions less like a static institutional page and more like a working portal, built to support the day-to-day financial and administrative needs of the Cornell community.