Digital Platform · Information Architecture
Character Lab
Format
Website Redesign · Learning Platform
Context
Exygy · Character Lab, 2023
My role
Experience Strategy · Information Architecture
Character Lab had become one of the leading voices in behavioral science. Its research reached educators, parents, researchers, school leaders, and students across the country. As the library expanded, finding the right knowledge became increasingly difficult.
How do you make behavioral science discoverable, understandable, and actionable for audiences arriving with completely different goals?
Users arrived with specific intent but encountered long-form content, inconsistent organization, and limited pathways into the research. Valuable evidence existed throughout the platform. It remained difficult to find.
I designed and conducted qualitative research across all five audience groups, synthesizing what I found into strategic decisions.
The interviews revealed patterns that pointed to the platform's architecture. People arrived with intent and needed to be met there directly. Application was the real product: turning research into something people could immediately use.
Finding 01
The real problem was findability.
Finding 02
Users needed multiple paths into the same knowledge: by topic, by audience, by format, by need.
Finding 03
People understood individual resources without understanding the organization that held them together.
Finding 04
Character Lab underestimated how much storytelling about its own impact mattered to every audience type.
Those findings became the foundation for the platform architecture.
I defined a new organizing principle: the platform would adapt to the mental models users already brought with them.
Every person, regardless of whether they arrived as an educator, a researcher, a parent, or a strategic partner, would find a clear path in.
Audience-aware entry
Topic, format & audience navigation
Action-ready
Experience architecture · Arrive → Orient → Apply · Exygy · Character Lab, 2023
Every page became both a destination and a starting point.
Experience Architecture
Research
Behavioral science
Topic
Grit · Kindness · etc.
Audience
Educator · Parent · etc.
Playbook
Depth & guidance
Format
Tip · Video · Book
Application
Classroom & home
I led the experience strategy that shaped the platform's information architecture, defining how navigation, taxonomy, and content relationships worked together across five distinct audiences.
We partnered with Exygy's marketing and strategy team to bring it to life.
Five audience groups · Character Lab · Exygy, 2023
The new architecture organized content into three connected layers: a central hub for discovery, topic-level destinations for deeper learning, and individual resources designed for immediate application.
Each playbook became a durable destination combining research, practical guidance, and related resources.
Topic hubs connected multiple content formats into a single learning journey.
Give every audience a clear path from evidence to action.
The redesign established a scalable content architecture that made Character Lab's research easier to discover, navigate, and extend over time.
The Character Hub introduced clearer audience pathways, stronger search, and flexible content structures capable of supporting hundreds of resources and future growth. Playbooks gave each character strength a coherent home, while topic pages made the relationship between research and practice visible at a glance.
Whether the medium is a website, a museum, or a physical environment, the challenge remains the same: make complexity understandable before asking people to act.