Project Overview
This project needed to align DUSA’s online brand with their current branding that appears in print, on campus, and in all other general communications. The website concept and structure was designed to in time extend in functionality, covering areas such as bookshop, further events, volunteers and memberships.
Project Commissioner
Deakin University Student Association
Project Creator
Team
Andrew Bitto, Account Manager
Chey Mose, Web Producer
Tracey Wiseman, Senior Designer
Josh Moncrieff, Front End Developer
Dom Melino, Kentico Developer
Mike Foden, Kentico Developer
Rakhee Patel, Tester
Project Brief
DUSA were looking to:
*Allow for club management via web portal (currently offline task by distributed systems).
*Allow for QA via document publishing workflows, to ensure their web publishing activities were reviewed and signed off.
*Allow online payments for club memberships and events, as a value add and revenue generator for clubs, as well as reducing management overhead.
*Provide tight integration with social media channels so to leverage the content being generated by users on social media.
The site also needed to be responsively designed, with both e-commerce and shopping cart functionality. The site needed to be optimised for mobile and tablet, and so was designed mobile first. It was also optimised for maximum performance, and optimised for responsive media.
The club management portal allows students to self-manage student clubs, including events, membership, sales, etc. This back end portal needed to be easy to use, and provide permissions that varied for every individual. The social feed on the homepage that pulls together content from various social media forums is also a feature, with the way you can view Youtube content right in the homepage feed.
Project Innovation/Need
Get Started met the need for mobile users to interact with the DUSA portal, and to control the information available on the DUSA site. Users can now edit their own information with DUSA’s personal profile dashboard, and club administrators have their own admin area so they can edit clubs, send club notices and control club members. We used inline style forms for ease of editing on the go, and created a site with responsive nature in mind in both administrative areas and front-facing content.
Design Challenge
The design challenge was to create an aesthetically youthful website while balancing the need to create ongoing student engagement. DUSA needed to feel like it belonged to students while managed by the Association. It needed to incite user engagement through social media (Facebook, Youtube, etc) without competing with these established mediums, and to feel a sense of high social activity while continuously provide a sense of community that also communicated important messages from the Student Association.
User Experience
There are two unique user experiences that drove the main conversion outcomes of DUSA. One is the students, and the other is the users that run clubs. For the student, we created a easy-to-use signing in process through an integrative social media log-in. Users can join a club and transact and buy tickets to events through an integrated e-commerce platform, and also build their personal student profile. For the club administrator they have access to manage their club on the front-facing website, have the ability to send messages, and create events for the clubs with a student to non-student pricing structure.
The club admin portal serves as a stylised web accessible content management system, outside of the CMS platform, and contains all the standard tasks required for management of a DUSA club in one location, also allowing for hierarchy and permissions to be defined for external users.
Digital Experience - Website
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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