Minnesota Office of Higher Education

The Client

The Minnesota Office of Higher Education (OHE) is a state agency that serves millions of students and families across Minnesota. Its mission is to connect individuals with the financial aid, resources, and guidance needed to pursue higher education. As the primary hub for this information, OHE’s website is an essential resource for students, parents, and high school counselors throughout the state.

The Situation

The department’s flagship website was hindered by confusing navigation, outdated and inaccessible design, and legacy software that was difficult to manage. OHE needed to transform its outdated digital presence into a modern, accessible, user-friendly platform.

The Challenge

OHE’s digital presence was fragmented across multiple websites, creating a disjointed and frustrating experience. The flagship website was built on an outdated legacy system, ColdFusion, with over 800 static HTML pages and 5,000 PDFs but no central content management system (CMS).

This setup created several critical challenges:

• Poor User Experience: The site suffered from a confusing and overly complex navigation structure, making it difficult for users to find important resources. An outdated visual design failed to meet modern accessibility standards and was not responsive on mobile devices.
   
• Inefficient Content Management: Without a CMS, the small editorial team couldn’t publish timely or engaging content without developer assistance. The process was slow, leading to stale content, broken links, and outdated pages. 
   
• Technical Limitations: The existing system lacked effective site search capabilities and media management tools. OHE’s internal development team had no experience with modern CMS platforms, posing a challenge for long-term site maintenance and sustainability.

OHE had valuable resources, but its digital infrastructure was preventing them from reaching the people who needed them most. The agency needed a comprehensive redesign and rebuild to create a more relevant, accessible, and engaging hub for the people of Minnesota.

The Solution

Acquia partner, Electric Citizen, worked with OHE to transform its outdated digital presence into a modern, accessible, and user-friendly platform. Electric Citizen led a full-scale redesign and migration project to address OHE’s challenges head-on. The solution focused on improving user experience, implementing a modern design, and building a sustainable technical foundation.

A User-Centric and Accessible Design

The project began with an extensive review of the existing site architecture. Through user testing and analysis, Electric Citizen developed a new simplified navigation that better served both user needs and organization goals. 

Building on OHE’s brand guidelines, Electric Citizen introduced a modern visual identity that emphasized warmth and human interaction. The new layout was clean and structured to support the site’s content-heavy nature while ensuring full accessibility and a seamless experience on any device.

A Powerful, Modern CMS

The core of the solution was migrating hundreds of static pages and thousands of documents from ColdFusion into Drupal. This move created a higher-performing, more secure, and fully accessible website. For hosting, Acquia Cloud Platform was the clear choice, offering security required for a government organization and the performance needed to serve millions of users annually.

Key components of the technical solution included:

• Acquia Cloud Platform: Provided a secure, high-performance hosting environment with managed DevOps, automated backups, and CI/CD capabilities.
   
• Acquia CDN: Improved website speed and performance through a distributed content delivery network.
   
• Acquia Pipelines: Enabled a powerful, repeatable deployment strategy, allowing the development team to work efficiently on multiple projects.
   
• Acquia Search powered by SearchStax: Integrated a powerful search tool capable of indexing and ranking both webpages and thousands of PDF files to deliver relevant results.

The Results

The 12-month project successfully transformed OHE’s digital platform, delivering measurable improvements in user engagement and operational efficiency. The new site not only met but exceeded expectations, even winning a design award in 2025.

Post-launch analytics revealed significant gains:

• 8% increase in average engagement time
• 19% increase in pages per session
• 6% increase in form submissions
• 23% improvement in mobile performance

By partnering with Electric Citizen and Acquia, the Minnesota Office of Higher Education successfully navigated a complex digital transformation. The move from an outdated system to an integrated Drupal and Acquia platform has strengthened OHE’s ability to connect with its audience. The new website provides an intuitive, accessible, and engaging experience for students and families, while the backend allows the OHE team to evolve their digital presence for years to come.