About Us - The University of Melbourne designed by James Calhoun
The About Us section of the University of Melbourne's website shapes how prospective students, staff, partners and the public understand the institution and a strategic priority for the Digital Experience team.
This project improved that experience without touching the system it runs on: an audit of the existing About Us pages, then targeted changes to hierarchy, content and imagery that were low-effort to build and high-impact to read, all within the constraints of what already existed.
Constraint
The university already had an established component library.
My approach
Audit content hierarchy and page composition → identify changes achievable within Gen2 → prototype → review with designers → present recommendations to DX leadership → prioritise delivery.
Audit of existing About section in The University of Melbourne website
What I found
An audit of the current pages surfaced three separate problems, not one.
Hierarchy: the information that mattered was buried, hard to find even when it existed on the page.
Content: major initiatives were compressed together with no separation. The Strategy and Governance page ran four of the university's core strategies into a single paragraph: Strategy 2030, Advancing Melbourne 2030, Advancing Students and Education Strategy, Advancing Research 2030. Four distinct things, read as one dense block.
Visual tone: the pages undersold the institution. None of it reflected the stature and heritage the university actually has.
The constraint
That constraint shaped the work three ways: content was restructured for a clearer hierarchy, using the refreshed card component and typographic treatment, the two places the system had some give, to separate what had been running together; sections were rebuilt with more current Gen2 components, swapped in for older ones that had drifted out of step with the rest of the system; and image selection did the work the components couldn't, chosen deliberately to bring the romance and heritage of the campus back into pages that had gone flat.
Strategy and Governance before and after
Before and after
The current page runs four separate university strategies into one paragraph, with no visual separation between them, so a reader has to parse a wall of text to find out there are four distinct initiatives at all.
The redesign didn't invent a new layout to fix this. It used the one place the system had flex, typographic treatment and the refreshed card component, to give each strategy its own entry instead of running four into one paragraph. Same content, mostly the same components, restructured so four things read as four things.
Outcome
Diagnosed three distinct problems (hierarchy, content, visual tone) behind one vague complaint
Solved all three within a matrix-governed system, using typographic treatment and one refreshed card component as the only points of flexibility
Built a repeatable composition approach applicable to other institutional content
Recommendations priori