MACQUARIE BUSINESS SCHOOL: RE-BRAND AND WEBSITE REDESIGN

One of the biggest and the most high-profile projects that I’ve worked on at Macquarie University is the Faculty of Business and Economics website redesign and re-brand. It entailed merging the Faculty along with the Macquarie Graduate School of Management (MGSM) and the Macquarie Applied Finance Centre (MAFC) to a new entity called the Macquarie Business School. My role was to come up with an effective Information Architecture (IA) and landing page designs that promotes the ethos and the brand of the new business school, while at the same time facilitating the core user journeys and functions that the main user groups undertake.

I had to work with various stakeholders from the faculty including the ones from MGSM and MAFC, plus the internal digital teams that included producers and developers. Working with a large and diverse group of stakeholders warranted a need to employ a Human Centred Design (HCD) approach (Discovery, Definition, Ideate, Prototype, Test and Iterate) to ensure that everyone had a common goal centred around the user groups, that is to provide an effective, relevant and useful information that is easy to find in the new website. Hence, I ran a requirements and design workshop as part of the discovery and definition phase with the representatives from each of the University groups to ascertain the user and business goals, along with the common user journeys and content requirements. It was very important to engage the main stakeholders early in the HCD process to ensure that everyone felt valued and that each had an opportunity to contribute in the new website design. The engagement with the core stakeholders continued throughout the HCD process, which included asking for feedback and approval for design concepts and acknowledgment of user testing that was conducted (Tree Test and First Click Test which were carried out using Optimal Workshop).