Imagine you’re building a single website that needs to work for all of these people at the same time: a PhD candidate evaluating whether to spend six years of their life in this lab, a tenured neuroscience professor looking for a collaborator, a parent in New Haven deciding whether to enroll their infant in a brain study, and an undergrad who just thinks the brain is cool and wants to learn more.
Those are all real visitors to the Turk-Browne Lab at Yale University. And meeting all of their needs with a single site is a much harder design problem than most people realize.
Here’s how we approached it, what we learned, and why it matters for any organization trying to serve wildly different audiences with a single digital experience.
Why multi-audience websites are so hard to get right
Academic lab websites have a unique challenge. The people visiting them have almost nothing in common with each other. A postdoc evaluating the lab’s publication record has completely different needs than a parent researching whether an infant brain study is safe. Most websites serve one primary audience. This one needed to serve four equally important ones.
The Turk-Browne Lab studies cognitive neuroscience (perception, attention, learning, and memory) and they’re doing genuinely groundbreaking work. They use fMRI on awake infants. They study how the brain predicts what will happen next. Their papers appear in journals like Science and Nature Neuroscience. The question for us was how to build an information architecture that communicated all of that to very different people without forcing anyone to wade through content meant for someone else.
Start with the audiences, not the org chart
Before we touched a design file, we mapped out who was actually coming to this site and what they needed:
Prospective graduate students and postdocs** need to evaluate the lab’s research focus, see who they’d work alongside, and understand the culture before reaching out. They’re comparing this lab against a dozen others. First impressions matter enormously.
Researchers and collaborators** need fast access to publications, research areas, and contact information. They already know the field. They need substance and they need it quickly.
Research participants (including parents of children)** need to understand what a study involves, feel safe, and find a clear path to sign up. Trust is everything here, because you’re asking people to let scientists scan their brain, or their kid’s brain.
Curious visitors and students** want to learn. They don’t have a specific goal yet. They’re exploring. The site needs to welcome them without overwhelming them.
Once we mapped those audiences, the information architecture practically designed itself. Instead of organizing content around the lab’s internal structure, we organized it around what each visitor actually needs to do.
Navigation that sorts people without making them think
The top nav has five items: People, Research, Publications, News, and Participate. That last one, Participate, gets a highlighted button treatment, because recruiting research participants is arguably the site’s most important job.
On the homepage, three cards immediately below the hero give visitors three clear doors: Research, Publications, and Participate. Each card has a one-line explanation of what you’ll find. A parent wondering about enrolling their child sees “Learn how you or your child can enroll in our research studies” and knows exactly where to go. A researcher looking for publications finds that path just as quickly.
Most academic sites force visitors to decode the navigation. We wanted each pathway to be obvious enough that people could self-sort within a few seconds of landing on the page.
Putting faces on science
One of the most effective elements on the site is the team grid on the homepage, a mosaic of actual lab member photos alongside a “Who We Are” section. We made this a strategic priority for a specific reason.
For a prospective grad student, seeing the real people in a lab matters more than almost anything else on the site. You’re choosing your professional community for the next several years. Knowing that the lab has postdocs, grad students, undergrads, and staff, and being able to click through to each person’s research interests and background, turns an abstract decision into a concrete one.
The People page organizes everyone by role without creating artificial hierarchy. Professor Turk-Browne’s profile comes first with institutional affiliations and CV access. Then postdocs, grad students, undergrads, staff, collaborators, and alumni, each with their own profile page. A student considering the lab can find someone studying memory development, read about their background, and send an informed email instead of a cold one.
Making complex research accessible without dumbing it down
The lab’s research spans five major areas: Statistical Learning, Infant Development, Memory Competition, Cognitive Training, and Predictive Coding. That’s serious neuroscience territory, and it could easily become impenetrable to anyone outside the field.
We structured each research area with the same consistent format: a plain-language explanation of what the topic is about, followed by specific examples that link directly to published papers. The key was finding the right entry point for each topic. Statistical Learning, for instance, opens with the idea that “the mind automatically detects and represents regularities,” which is something anyone can relate to. Then it gradually introduces the methods (behavioral tasks, fMRI, computational modeling) for readers who want more depth.
The Research Highlights carousel on the homepage rotates through recent findings as clickable cards. “How can neurofeedback be used to change memories?” is the kind of question that hooks anyone, not just neuroscientists. Each card pulls from a real published paper but leads with a human-readable question that draws you in before you ever see a journal citation.
The Academy: education as a trust-building tool
One of the site’s most distinctive features is the Academy, a growing collection of explainers written for people without neuroscience backgrounds. Topics include what happens in a behavioral experiment, what intracranial recording involves, and how fMRI works.
This section does triple duty. For prospective research participants, it demystifies the process and builds the trust needed to actually sign up. For parents considering whether to enroll their child, it provides the reassurance that turns “that sounds scary” into “that sounds interesting.” For students exploring the field, it’s a genuine educational resource.
The Academy also reflects something the lab genuinely cares about: making science understandable rather than gatekeeping it behind jargon. That philosophy runs through the entire site, but the Academy is where it’s most visible.
Accessibility: built for real people, not just compliance
Yale’s institutional requirements mandate WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, and we took that seriously from day one. Accessibility was designed into the project from the first wireframe, not bolted on at the end with an automated checker.
What that looks like in practice: proper heading hierarchy so screen readers can navigate logically, high-contrast design for readability, clear focus indicators for keyboard navigation, descriptive link text (no “click here”), accessible forms with clear labels and error messaging, and no auto-playing media.
We tested manually (keyboard-only navigation, screen reader testing with VoiceOver, color contrast validation) in addition to automated checks. The result is a site that meets Yale’s standards without relying on third-party overlay plugins, which are widely considered inadequate by accessibility experts.
This matters to us because accessibility affects real people. Someone using a screen reader to navigate a research lab’s website deserves the same experience as anyone else. Getting the heading structure right, making sure every image has meaningful alt text, ensuring that keyboard navigation works on every page, this is the kind of work that most agencies skip because it’s tedious and invisible to most visitors. But for the visitors who rely on it, it’s the difference between being able to use the site and not. That’s worth doing right.
Passing Yale’s security review
One detail about this project that doesn’t get talked about enough: Yale rarely permits their affiliated projects to be hosted externally. Their IT security team needed to evaluate and approve our hosting infrastructure, security protocols, and backup systems before the project could move forward.
We passed that review, and it wasn’t a rubber stamp. Yale’s standards are rigorous, especially for anything associated with the university’s name and research activities. Our Webflow hosting setup, combined with our security and backup infrastructure, met their requirements.
This matters beyond Yale. Banks, universities, healthcare organizations, and government-adjacent groups all have heightened security expectations for their web presence. The fact that we’ve been through Yale’s review process and passed is something we take seriously, because it validates the standards we apply to every project, not just the ones with institutional oversight.
What we learned about designing for multiple audiences
The Turk-Browne Lab project reinforced something we see across very different industries: the best websites create clear pathways so each visitor can quickly find their way to the content that’s relevant to them.
The homepage doesn’t open with a list of the lab’s achievements. It opens with a clear statement of purpose and three obvious pathways to action, because leading with what visitors need (rather than what the organization wants to showcase) makes every other design decision easier.
The team grid does more to humanize the lab than any amount of copy about published papers. And every research area follows the same format, every person’s profile has the same structure, because consistency lets visitors learn the navigation pattern once and apply it everywhere.
The accessibility and security work may be the least visible parts of the project, but they’re arguably the most important. Building an accessible site from the start takes less effort than retrofitting one later, and it means you’re taking every visitor seriously. Passing a rigorous security review means you’re building infrastructure that institutions can trust with their reputation.
The Turk-Browne Lab website is live at ntblab.yale.edu. Built on Webflow by MPC Studios, with full WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance and Yale-approved secure external hosting.
Working on a website for a research lab, university department, or organization with complex audience needs? Let’s talk
