Douglas College Website | Burst! Creative Group

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Douglas College is the largest public degree-granting college institution in British Columbia and is now celebrating over 50 years of operation. Close to 17,000 current students, 8,500 continuing education students and 4,210 international students are enrolled.

The challenge

Sitearchitecture.

The challenges we faced included having to create a site architecture and a seamless user journey, primarily for students to find pertinent information. We had to develop a layout template plan that would best suit a large amount of content pages (roughly 200+ pages). We needed to increase brand equity and student enrollment by focusing on user experience and site architecture.

With all the content in mind, we still had to keep the website clean and exciting. We had to design a user-friendly search interface and co-ordinate functional requirements. UX standards were met with an external development team. We also ensured that the menu system would work well on mobile devices, while being easy to navigate.

Services

Website
Design
Prototyping
Style Concepts
Responsive Design

Prototyping

Architecture.

As an integral part of the design process, prototyping allowed our team to present concepts and share feedback in the early stages to the manager of the digital experience and the Art Department. We were able to flag any shortcomings in its flow and usability by creating interactive mockups for web and mobile before handing over to the web development team.

Style concepts

Well designed
style guides.

Our designers worked collaboratively with the client to gain a thorough understanding of the schools’ objectives which led us to make the right aesthetic choices in typeface, buttons, supporting elements, images and interactions to facilitate the telling of the client’s story.

Website

Content
comes first.

The platform uses Drupal to create an intuitive and easy to use browsing capability for students. The simplicity of it’s installation and framework allowed the ability to customize the design which gave creative license to the client to promote Douglas.

Responsive design

The future
is vertical.

We ensured that the design met the requirements for the visually impaired by selecting the brand and complementary colors and artwork that would read well online and draw attention to the particular end-user. The content was our greatest challenge when balancing form with function. However, with a thoroughly strategic user plan, well-executed wireframes and prototyping, the style concepts came together smoothly. A great number of students, especially in their targeted age group, use their mobile devices to access Douglas College’s website. Hence, it was paramount to create a strong layout that works synchronously with different screen sizes that offer a comfortable user experience.