Engineering a new website
for Engineers Australia
Overview
Engineers Australia (EA) is the nation’s largest and most influential member association representing engineers from across all disciplines.
Representing more than 100,000 members, EA provides engineers with training and development, accredits the institutions delivering tertiary education, and assesses the skills of engineers from across the globe.
Background
EA’s website is the digital front door to their organisation and the primary way members and non-members engage with the brand. It also serves a diverse range of audiences with different needs, including non-members, engineering employers, and partners.
Aligning with EA's strategic goals, Icon was tasked with designing and developing a new Drupal-based website using best practice, UX-led thinking.
Challenge
EA’s existing website lacked a precise representation of its goals, intuitive navigation, searchability and clarity of content structure. The biggest challenge Icon faced was overhauling a confusing navigation and complex information architecture.
EA has a vast target audience base, which resulted in a new information architecture that has a large number of navigation items sitting at the top level.
The issue of displaying this amount of top-level navigation items using a traditional horizontal navigation would likely cause information overload for their users, and take attention away from important content when first landing on the website.
Another challenge was making the content management system easy to use for content editors. The team also needed a library of components that could be used across different content types to build well designed pages for their audiences.
Solution
Icon used a thorough testing process to establish the best way to lay out content and display a complex information architecture on the new website. Our solution helped break through the traditional use of a horizontal menu system, replacing it with a hamburger menu that could more easily accommodate the website's structure.
We worked closely with EA and their stakeholders during the design and development phase to ensure their content team had the required web components to create and maintain content on the new website. Over twenty web components working across different content types were designed and developed during the process.
Results
The final outcome is a modern and clean website with an easy-to-use navigation system. A more intuitive backend for content creation accommodates over twenty web components available for content editors to utilise.
This wouldn’t be possible without the close-knit working relationship with Engineers Australia’s project team and its stakeholders.
You can view the new website here.
Services
User experience research (UX)
User interface design (UI)
Drupal development
