MSU | Trauma-Informed Repository

In the wake of COVID-19, Michigan State University saw a growing demand for essential needs support across its community. Our team set out to understand what those needs truly looked like for students and staff, with me leading the research effort to transform a flat list of resources into a purposeful, user-centered directory informed by the emotional complexity of seeking help.

Designing for essential needs means designing for vulnerability, as users arrive with varying levels of trust, urgency, and history with institutional systems.

• Resource discoverability — users often do not know what resources exist or where to look, making navigation and findability a foundational design concern
• Accessibility as a barrier to entry — the format and language of a resource directly shapes whether a user feels able to engage with it at all
• Trauma and past experience — users may be influenced by prior negative experiences when seeking help, requiring deliberate attention to tone, structure, and emotional safety
• Institutional exclusion — focus groups surfaced a pattern of universities feeling gatekeeping by default, making it critical to design against that perception intentionally

Our team began with a comparative analysis of other universities' needs portals, evaluating their information architecture and identifying where trauma-informed design principles could be meaningfully applied. Drawing from researchers like Melissa Eggleston, we ran a research sprint to develop design heuristics grounded in both evidence and empathy.

Focus groups gave us direct access to community members' lived experiences with essential needs, surfacing emotional patterns that informed our user personas. I then conducted usability tests on existing university directories to map friction points in common user flows, identifying where people dropped off or felt confused.

I led three two-week design sprints, guiding the team from wireframes through low to high fidelity mockups and into an interactive prototype in Adobe XD. Each sprint incorporated structured feedback cycles, allowing us to iterate based on what we heard rather than what we assumed.

• Trauma-aware information architecture — structuring content so users can find what they need without feeling overwhelmed or judged by the categories they are browsing
• Inclusive language and tone — every label, heading, and microcopy choice was evaluated for clarity, warmth, and freedom from stigma
• Iterative co-design — involving community members across sprint reviews kept the work grounded in real needs rather than institutional assumptions
• Scalable research framework — the heuristics and design documentation we built were structured to support future updates as the resource landscape evolves

The project is currently awaiting review by university administration, with user testing frameworks already in place for the next phase. The research foundation, tested prototype, and documented heuristics position the directory to move forward quickly once approval is granted.

• Relearning is a design tool — approaching this domain without prior assumptions meant actively unlearning default patterns, which pushed our team toward more nuanced, human-centered decisions
• Learning never ends — each sprint revealed new layers of user need, reinforcing that a living product requires ongoing listening well beyond the initial research phase
• Talk about the discomfort — in trauma-informed work, creating an open atmosphere for honest conversation was as important to the process as it was to the product itself
• Perfection is impossible — while no design can be perfect, building in feedback loops ensured our work remained responsive to real input rather than fixed assumptions