Collège Sainte-Anne- Collège Sainte-Anne

The real problem was not a website to redesign. It was a growing network with no digital infrastructure capable of evolving with it. The recent integration of a new school in Rosemont, and the anticipation of further acquisitions, made a systemic response urgent. The key decision: design a system from the start, not 8 separate sites. Shared architecture, reusable components, an extensible color logic. Every decision had to hold at scale, not just for the current project.

Before any wireframe, I ran co-creation workshops directly in the schools.

The goal: understand what makes each institution unique, identify friction points in existing journeys, and ground UX decisions in the reality of the teams, not in assumptions.

A survey was also sent across the network to gather teacher perspectives on the experience of parents and students, and to map real usage patterns on the existing sites. These insights directly shaped the information architecture, editorial hierarchy, and CMS block structure. Every structural decision traced back to a concrete need, not a generic convention.

With multiple schools, multiple grade levels, and multiple audiences (parents, students, prospective teachers), disorientation was a real risk. The cross-school navigation was fully rethought to help users locate themselves quickly, compare schools, and find the right information based on their context. Two structural decisions drove this:

• Consistent navigation across sites: same landmarks, same access logic, same journey rhythm. This reduces learning effort, especially for parents navigating across several schools.

• Action-oriented narrative order: discover, understand, project, act (enrollment, open houses, contact). Every page follows this arc without forcing it.

The architecture was also designed to remain stable when a new school is added, with no major reorganization required.

Families do not choose a school based on a feature list. They need to picture themselves there. The "Live the Sainte-Anne Experience" page was designed as a form of virtual open house.

The journey follows a narrative structure built around three complementary perspectives: student, parent or teacher, and school leadership.

This creates an emotional connection and builds confidence. The visual language (school-specific colors, background murals, video content) reflects real school life, not a generic institutional image. This approach turns information browsing into a projection experience, a durable conversion lever during enrollment periods.

The central UI challenge: each school has its own identity, culture, and color codes, but all of them must form a recognizable network. I co-designed the design system with the art director, treating this tension as a design constraint rather than a problem to work around. Key decisions:

• Extensible color logic per school, designed to absorb new institutions without requiring a redesign

• Components shared across all sites, but configurable per school identity

• A differentiated experience for the college level (tone, hierarchy, imagery) that stays within the shared framework

• Accessibility built in from the start: controlled contrast ratios, keyboard navigation, semantic structure

The system protects visual quality and accessibility without removing the creative autonomy that makes each school feel like itself.

Delivering a design system is one thing. Making sure teams can actually use it is another. Beyond the design work, I accompanied the client teams during content creation, helping them select the right blocks for the right contexts and understand the logic behind the system.

I also worked with the developers to define user-friendly naming for every block in the CMS, so that editorial choices felt intuitive for non-technical teams. A component called "Feature highlight with CTA" gets used correctly. A component called "Block 14" does not. Small decisions at this level protect the quality of the system long after the project closes.

The careers site had to solve a perception problem. Sainte-Anne is often seen as "a school," when in reality it brings together a wide range of roles across innovation, communications, operations, student services, and labs.

Qualified candidates were not considering Sainte-Anne simply because those roles were not visible. The journey was framed from a survey of internal teams, aimed at understanding how candidates discover Sainte-Anne, what they are looking for, and where the process creates friction.

The careers site was then structured to address those gaps: communicate the culture, surface the diversity of roles, and simplify the path to applying. The employer brand becomes a real attraction lever for profiles that would never have considered Sainte-Anne without this visibility.