The two teams that said no, and what changed their minds

Cutting Indiana University's website launch from seven steps to two sounds like a design problem. It was mostly a people problem. Every step belonged to a team, and each team had a reason for being there.

I was the junior on the project. I led the research, talking to all seven teams as a colleague, not an auditor. Two of them were hard to convince.

The first was the team that manages university accounts. They handle records at a very high level, and they didn't want to work inside our new system. That was fair. Their work has stakes ours doesn't.

What worked was taking them out of the mandatory path. The new process simply assumes a requester already has an account. The accounts team no longer has to check each request, and they sit a little outside the flow, while everything after them still runs in order. They said yes because we asked less of them, not more.

The second was the person who reviews website content. They wanted a clear line of communication with the requester the whole way through, from development to just before launch. Their worry was real: if they can't ask questions, bad content goes live under IU's name.

But a running conversation with every requester wasn't sustainable for one reviewer. So we moved the questions to the start. The context they needed is gathered once, at intake, and kept in one place in ServiceNow, where every team can see it. They got the answers without the back-and-forth.

Tesler's law says every system has some complexity that can't be removed, only moved (Laws of UX). We didn't make the accounts check or the content questions disappear. We moved them, into an assumption and into an intake form, so nobody had to carry them by hand.

One team didn't need convincing at all. Web support used to route every request to the right team by hand. They were the happiest about the change, because now the system carries that complexity instead of them.

We also built it in ServiceNow, a tool IU already paid for, instead of something new. A new tool would have meant one more thing for seven teams to learn. Asking them to change how they work was already a lot.

Looking back, the research got me into every room. It didn't give me the influence to change minds on its own. When the big redesign decisions came, my manager led them. Next time, I'd bring more conviction earlier.