UCSF Institute for Global Health Sciences:
A Website Redesign Built Around Visitor Intent

We started with a discovery workshop: bringing IGHS's many internal stakeholders together to surface where the existing site was failing them, and using that shared conversation to set real priorities before a single wireframe existed.

For an institute with as many competing internal voices as IGHS, that alignment work wasn't a formality. It was the thing that made every later decision easier to make and easier to defend.

We studied other content-heavy institutional sites — the kind that, like IGHS, have to serve students, donors, faculty, and press all from the same homepage. We distilled those insights into strategic decisions about how to structure a site with such extensive content and diverse audiences.

The imagery on IGHS's site couldn't just look global — it had to represent the communities IGHS serves honestly. Oak Theory sourced and selected photography directly from IGHS's field programs, and made a deliberate choice about whose story each image told: the communities and people being served, not only the researchers and staff doing the serving.

That meant actively steering away from the white-savior visual tropes so common in global health photography, and instead giving that space to the people IGHS's work is actually for.

The biggest problem wasn't that IGHS had too much content — it was that none of it was organized around what a visitor was actually trying to do. Oak Theory rebuilt the site's architecture around real visitor intent, leaning on strong imagery and functional search and quick-link systems to replace walls of undifferentiated text.

Oak Theory worked inside UCSF's existing brand guidelines — refreshing color and typography choices to modernize the experience while keeping the site unmistakably part of the UCSF family. A constraint, used well, became the thing that gave the new design its consistency.

Nine templates, reviewed by dozens of stakeholders, needed to feel like one website — not nine separate design opinions stitched together. Oak Theory documented every UI decision into a reusable system, so consistency didn't depend on any one person remembering every prior choice.