Hundreds of thousands of users from all walks of life

City of Oulu

In a nutshell

Project duration

5 months initial work + support activity

Platform

Responsive Drupal website

  • UX Designer

  • UX/UI Designer (me)

  • Project Lead

  • 2 x Drupal developers

Team

  • Defining and implementing the design process and design principles

  • UI/UX design

  • Prototyping

  • User research & testing

  • Planning DesignOps work and metrics

  • Building the design system tokens and assets

My responsibilities

The Challenge 👀

Oulu is a city with a population of 200 000+ in northern Finland. It is a technological hub with vibrant cultural scene, educational instutions and research centers. The city’s old website was largely outdated and receiving poor feedback from the users. Oulu had also recently updated its brand, which wasn’t possible to implement effectively on the old site, mostly due to the outdated platform.

The contents were to be migrated to Drupal and the site redesigned thoroughly, putting special focus on accessibility and easily navigable content – without forgetting a modern and polished look, integrating the fresh brand assets already deployed to marketing.

City of Oulu has hundreds of content creators who update their “mini-sites” relatively autonomously. This had to be taken into account in designing the content components – enough options had to be offered, but also prevent creating non-consistent or non-user friendly layouts.

Solution 🛠️

A concept for the new site and its information structure had already been created – also a comprehensive list of stakeholder requirements was readily available. The work started by delving into the material and doing various stakeholder interviews.

While the site structure and a navigational concept was being formed, I created a visual concept for the site with the theme “something old, something new, something blue”. The concept was validated and fine-tuned in multiple sessions with the client.

Next, I started creating wireframes and layouts for various content types, as per to Drupal’s way of structuring information. These were validated in design review sessions with the client – the process was carried out completely in Figma, which made gathering information and making adjustments easy.

Special attention was paid to ensure the usability and accessibility of the UI components, while also keeping in mind the CMS nature of the site. I delivered the final layouts of components and page templates to the developers, and also continued supporting them and fine-tuning the designs in later stages of development as well. I created an easy-to-use component library and basic elements of a design system into Figma for future design efforts.

The design phase timeline did not allow for traditional user testing and concept validation – this was mitigated as much as possible by relying on best practices and experience the team had from earlier, similar projects. Also comprehensive benchmarking was made to find out the practices and patterns that work best in city/communal sites.

Results 🥳

New ouka.fi was released in Oct 2023 and the initial response has been very positive, spurring spontaneous posts on social media, etc. Some metrics will be updated here as soon as they become available.