UCI Cycling World Championships 2023
Sharing the biggest cycling event ever.
University of Glasgow
Bringing consistency to a university web estate
The ask
The University of Glasgow is the fourth oldest university in the world, with 43,000 students and nearly 10,000 staff. Its enormous web estate features more than 100 student touchpoints across various websites and apps. Content creation for the university is also widely distributed, with 5,000 content editors.
With all these contributors across multiple systems, the university’s web estate had become visually and structurally disjointed. We were tasked with creating a design system that could bring simplicity and consistency to the university’s websites and apps.
4
weeks development time
22
components built
14
prototypes
What we did
We built out a design system that covered:
- design guidance such as typography, colours and spacing
- visual designs and standards for a selection of commonly used components
- written guidance for when and how to use the components we’d designed
Collaboration was vital to the design system. We worked closely with University of Glasgow stakeholders through a series of workshops, show and tell sessions and presentations.
We created desktop and mobile prototypes of key user journeys to demonstrate how the design system could be used and the user journeys could be simplified. The prototypes were used to demonstrate implementation of the design system to the University’s leadership team.
Research
Together, we ran multiple user research sessions to understand the needs of:
- regular users of the design system, such as the university’s web team
- occasional users, such as academics who edit content on an ad-hoc basis
- end users of the sites and services designed using the system, such as staff and students
This helped us to make sure that our design system would solve the most important problems to the people who’d need to use it. We also worked closely as a team within Storm ID, with designers, user researchers and content designers all contributing to the finished product.
Results
The design system was a definitive step towards establishing standardised, consistent design across the University of Glasgow web estate. By using the components and guidance we created, university content editors, developers and external agencies will be able to build more usable web properties. The design system is scalable and can be expanded to suit more use cases in future.
