DS Hub strives to establish thought leadership in digital sustainability by developing a holistic approach by which entrepreneurial organizations and communities deploy future-ready digital technologies.
DS Hub strives to establish thought leadership in digital sustainability by developing a holistic approach by which entrepreneurial organizations and communities deploy future-ready digital technologies. This holistic approach begins with a detailed analysis of the complex societal challenges facing sustainability issues and works towards innovative digital solutions to address these grand challenges. DS Hub proposes a two-fold research approach to generate knowledge and digital solutions for entrepreneurship, new working models, industry transformation, urban policy, and business ecosystems. First, by conducting evidence-based research, the Hub strives to spur empirical advances by building on top of the theoretical foundation of DS. Second, by applying innovative thinking, the Hub endeavours to develop and deploy digital artefacts that positively impact sustainable development. Ultimately, DS Hub’s goal is to be capable of developing and practising digital sustainability research, teaching, knowledge dissemination and engagement.
The main challenge for this project was to create a customized new website aligned with the UNSW brand/look & feel, easy to use and simple in its structure to digest content. In addition, one of the specific requirements of the DS hub team was a website that was easy to update or publish content for any person with no previous experience in managing websites.
Workshop – Figjam
The initial phase considered the research of target users for the website and a workshop with the client to find answers to some key questions, and a session to map out all the content required to be included on the website. Next, we organized the elements by doing a simple card sorting exercise and then putting them together in a tree of content to understand what to do in the design stage.
Even though the website wouldn’t be too big in terms of content, the card sorting session gave me a good understanding of the information architecture and the hierarchy of contents to work on the design stage with confidence and more precision.
One of the card sorting session findings was that it was needed to create ordinary news and events posts sections and have similar functionality for posts related only to “Education” or “Impact.” These two are the most relevant section of interest for the DS hub.
Design phase & prototyping
Getting all the contents organized for the website, I kicked off the design phase by making high-quality mockups, including the main sections/pages. Next, I’ve set up a simple design system, including the main branding components and style guidelines to be used consistently across Figma.
These early designs and prototypes were beneficial for the client because they could get a good idea about the final content to be supplied and included in all the sections. In addition, the prototype gave an excellent view of what the user journey would be like on the website, and I was able to amend some web interactions and sections across the project.
