What happens when you hand a group of sharp, curious Industrial and Operations Engineering students a problem that's been on your to-do list for years and say, "Have at it"?
If you're MLC, you get a semester-long collaboration that left us with better tools, a clearer direction, and a genuine appreciation for what happens when the next generation of continuous improvement thinkers turns their attention toward your organization.
A Real Problem, a Real Partnership
The MLC website has served us well, but we've known for a while that it needed some love. Pages had grown cluttered over time. Navigation requires too many clicks. Broken links had crept in. And there was no standard process for keeping things updated, which meant the same issues kept coming back.
Enter a team of four seniors from the University of Michigan's Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, enrolled in IOE 424, Senior Design. From January through April 2026, Braden, Ethan, Tian, and Zhongyi took on the MLC website as their capstone project, working directly with our team and board to research, analyze, design, and deliver a comprehensive plan for what the site could become.
They Started Where Good Lean Work Always Starts: With the User
Before touching a single page or suggesting a single change, the team did their homework.
They conducted in-depth stakeholder interviews, surveying MLC members about how they use the site, what frustrates them, and what they'd most want to see improved. They mapped the entire current website, every page, every link, every dependency, and identified redundancies, dead ends, and navigation patterns that made it harder than it needed to be to find what you were looking for.
And then they did something that made us smile: they applied the 8 Wastes framework to the website.
Overproduction: too much text, too many sections crowding the homepage. Motion: excess clicks required to get to event registration or membership information. Defects: broken links, inconsistent formatting, buttons that went nowhere. Seeing our own website through a Lean lens was both humbling and energizing. They weren't just web designers. They were continuous improvement practitioners who happened to know how to build wireframes.
A Clear Design Vision
From that foundation, the team developed a complete redesign concept, grounded in research, shaped by member feedback, and built to be sustainable for a small-staff organization running on WildApricot.
Their guiding principle was simple: design for the new visitor first. Someone who doesn't know MLC yet should be able to land on the homepage and understand in under ten seconds who we are, why we exist, and how to get involved. Everything else flows from that.
The deliverables didn't stop at ideas. The team produced a detailed site map, a full updated brand guide for consistent future use, site mockups, a platform migration report, and a standard operating procedure for website maintenance.
What We Took Away
Partnering with Braden, Ethan, Tian, and Zhongyi was one of the highlights of our year. They brought energy, rigor, and a genuinely fresh perspective to a problem we'd been living with for too long. They asked good questions. They pushed back when something didn't make sense. And they delivered.
It's a good reminder that sometimes the best thing you can do is invite people in who aren't too close to the problem, people who will look at your website the way a first-time visitor would, or apply a framework you use every day in a context you never thought to apply it.
That's what these students did. And MLC is better for it.
What’s Next
The work doesn’t stop with the handoff. Over the coming months, we’ll be using the site map and redesign framework the team delivered to guide updates to the MLC website. There’s a clear plan in front of us now, and we’re excited to put it into action.
As changes go live, we’ll be keeping the community in the loop through the Lean Lighthouse. If something looks different the next time you visit michiganlean.org, that’s a good thing and we’ll tell you what changed and why.
A Thank You
We're deeply grateful to Dr. Debra Levantrosser at the University of Michigan for facilitating this partnership and supporting the team throughout the semester. This collaboration wouldn't have happened without her.
If your organization is interested in partnering with University of Michigan IOE students on a future project, reach out to Dr. Debra Levantrosser at levantro@umich.edu. We'd highly recommend it.