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A world-leading community transforming hearing and communication.
The Australian Hearing Hub is working towards optimising hearing health for all and transforming life outcomes for people with hearing loss.
Macquarie University is a world-class research, treatment and innovation institution – a dynamic environment which drove the creation of the Australian Hearing Hub. The Australian Hearing Hub unites researchers, educators, clinicians and innovators with expertise in linguistics, audiology, speech pathology, cognitive and language sciences, psychology, nanofabrication and engineering sciences.
RDS’s remit was to redesign the Australian Hearing Hub website to be a centralised online “Hub”, facilitating signposting for visitors seeking clinics/education/research, an up-to-date resource for HearingHub events and news, and a showcase of international excellence in Hearing Research for funding bodies.
The vision of the HearingHub website is a centralised online “Hub”, however the existing site suffered from multiple issues (26s page load, old-fashioned design, content structure issues, inconsistency in design).
One of the major issues was the user journey through the site; and with a diverse target audience (AHH member employees, researchers, government agencies, grant bodies, potential tenants, potential suppliers, those supporting people with hearing loss (children, carers etc), people with hearing loss, students, people working in the field of hearing loss looking for education, academics) improved navigation and a more interactive landing page was a must in order to facilitate an improved user experience, regardless of the user type.
The needs and goals for an organisation like the Hearing Hub and its user base are often similar, but not necessarily the same. The organisation must simultaneously carry out its mission and attract members and donors, affecting how the organisation provides services. The user base support the mission, but will benefit from the services provided by the organisation. As a result, part of this refresh involves understanding both the needs of the organisation and the target audience.
RDS delivered a two-hour Stakeholder Workshop in which participating Australian Hearing Hub members were invited to identify key needs and goals the refreshed website should address. This allowed us to tease out the vision for the site, the complex and diverse target audiences, and existing issues with the current site.
The refresh encompassed not only theme and design work, but significant work on the information architecture - consolidating and re-designing content structure and mappings to significantly improve user experience. The navigation was re-designed to facilitate quick-access to a diverse database of content; targeting multiple users simultaneously by providing signposting from the landing page directly enables users to quickly access content relevant to them. Custom python code was written to migrate the existing content into the new site design and layout, and the impact of the Hub was showcased with testimonials, and organised content (news, events, member profiles).
The redesigned site can be explored at hearinghub.edu.au
The redesigned website has significant speed and performance improvements ensuring fast response times across both mobile and desktop devices.
Upgrading to WP6.1 and integrating various security measures ensures the site is robust and protected, and analytics configuration will enable meaningful UX reporting in 12 months time.
A follow-up UX review of the refreshed site at 12 months will be conducted.