A virtual exhibition to showcase student work developed across various projects in the Master of Design Innovation and Technology (MDIT) program at RMIT University, Melbourne.
B45 Exhibition 🎟
👁 The engagement time on the website during the exhibition averaged around 5 minutes and 13 seconds.
clientS
Ross McLeod, Program Manager, MDIT
Chuan Khoo, Associate Professor, MDIT
team
Saicharan Suresh, Stephanie Ochona,
Tristan Goddard, Joseph Yap, Wanlin Zhao
Roles
Student Lead, Lead Web Developer,
Brand Designer, UX Designer (Interaction Designer)
duration
4 Months
March 2021 - June 2021
At the end of each semester, the Master of Design Innovation and Technology course’s exhibition showcases student work, developed in the various design studios electives and major projects. Open to design professionals, industry guests and the public, each iteration of the next exhibition celebrates the work of students through a unique theme.
“Craft a web experience to host students’ works developed over the semester.”
The Brief 💡
The B45 teaser video I created for the event was widely recognised and appreciated by students and staff alike.
This not only referred to the interaction between the physical and digital, but also acted as a guide for the curation and grouping of the projects on display.
This semester's theme was "intersections"
😬 Based on the insights, we scrapped the use of Kunstmatrix for this edition of the student exhibition
“I just want to find my project without having to go
looking for it! Why can’t the online exhibition be simple?”
-Rita Leung, Student, MDIT
“The interactions in the previous iterations of the exhibition
really annoyed me. It was a pain going through each and
every room on Kunstmatrix.”
- Bosco Bartilomo, Student, MDIT
Before jumping into building the exhibition website, I first started to investigate why a redesign was required for the exhibition site. The postmortem analysis showed us that the previous exhibition site was not very user friendly. Interviews with students reveal that Kunstmatrix, an interactive gallery engine, was the root cause.
Insights 🤔
"Since this was an online exhibition during the COVID lockdowns in Melbourne, the goal for branding was to bring the outside, inside."
Courses offered at MDIT were categorised into different research streams.
“The direction I took with the website is to treat it as a story of what inspired us to start our brand. Webflow was the obvious choice because it gives total control over the design. Let’s chat if you’d like to know the whole process. “
Project Execution 🕸
We created a website that scrolls horizontally enables new ways for storytelling with large typography and also allows for a unique website experience. The website was first designed on Figma with a UX lens. The design went through multiple iterations before arriving at the one below. I set up a comprehensive CMS structure on Webflow to manage and accommodate students' works.
Outcome 🙌
Through Google Analytics we were able to monitor and analyse our website traffic. We were able to achieve an average engagement time of 5m 14s with the industry average engagement time being 3m!
Impact 🔥
Bottom line—having a design system in place helped me think less about how I can accomplish the same thing again in different projects. I know that once done, I can re-use those components from user flows, wireframes, and mockups. I spent time in getting all the components ready on Figma before designing the High Fidelity wireframes.
I learnt the importance of Design Systems!
