Mid Sweden University

The new responsive web platform for The Mid Sweden University was a project that started out with a lot of research. We put up some initial workshops with people from different departments of the university, so that we could structure a solid content model.

It was a great experience to get all this information first hand from people who knew the organization inside out. It was the first project I"ve been involved in which conducted this type of research.

After getting the content model roughly sorted out, we set out creating some initial mockups which we iterated through with the client as well as the integration team from KnowIT.

From there, we did parallel design / front-end work and I worked very tight with the integration team to get the front-end code to play well with EpiServer which served as CMS.

Designing websites for universities is said to be one of the hardest tasks in this industry, and I agree. It was a valuable experience to work on such a complex system. I learned a lot about the need of anchoring your arguments in the data we collected early on. It’s usually easy to make decisions on the whim of the moment but here we had a plethora of information that guided us.

In architecting the front-end, I tried as usual to break down the design into as small components as possible so that every part of the website could be updated independently.

It was a project that took roughly 9 months from start to first release. I got to work with a bunch of smart people and had to try out environments I wasn't used to so I learned a ton from this project.