Nominee – 2023 Vancouver UX Award for Best Public Sector Experience
Emily Carr University’s annual exhibition of graduating student work, known as The Show, is a must-see event in Vancouver’s cultural calendar. The pandemic forced the traditionally in-person event online, a move that increased accessibility but left students and faculty missing the buzz of the community in attendance. We were asked to create a new online exhibition space for The Show that could recapture that sense of togetherness and camaraderie.
Graduating projects are for many students their first online portfolio piece, and they live on for years after that year’s Show. Knowing this, we built in a profile space for each student that optionally includes a way to be contacted for work opportunities. It’s a feature that reflects the nature of graduation: a culmination of effort and the very start of a new era as a career artist or designer.
I believe one of the most important learnings [from 2020] was how a thoughtfully-designed website contributes to the student experience of the event. Already an incredibly stressful time of year for students, the additional role that social distancing played in disrupting the typically large-scale, in-person event, couldn’t be ignored. Showcasing and archiving student work in a beautiful way was one way of ensuring students felt cared for and appreciated during a tough time. The redesigned Show website went above-and-beyond to accomplish this.
Grace McRae-Okine, Marketing Manager (2021)
Highlights
Exhibition Space for 300+ Students
We implemented a custom WordPress instance that imported the Registrar’s official list of graduating students and created an account for each with access to a single page project workspace. Different from a multi-site installation, everything is in one website and only administrators have access to all projects.
In their project pages, students had an array of standard and custom content building blocks to showcase their projects. Project pages shared a common, neutral look and feel to avoid competing with the work, and for most students that’s enough to express their vision. Students with web-coding knowledge, however, could go off-road and inject custom styles and functionality.
Student Onboarding & Support
Students have a wide range of comfort and familiarity with web publishing tools, so we put a lot of work into guidance and how-to documentation. On creation of their accounts, students received emails that outlined how their project showcase worked in general terms, and pointed to several pre-made example projects representative of major disciplines at ECU.
On logging into the website students found their project page pre-populated with links to built-in documentation, and a number of support channels such as Slack, Discord, and email that they could use to ask questions and report any problems.
In subsequent years we worked with administrators to hire student interns who ran overview presentations well ahead of the website’s opening for that year’s grads, and who act as first-tier support for students after training with us.
Each year the documentation is updated to keep pace with changes to WordPress content tools, and to reflect feedback and common questions from students.
Taking on support responsibilities let us hear and respond to issues quickly and keep people moving. What we learned was fed back into rapid refinements of interfaces and documentation, and visitors got very fast, accurate support.
Bringing the Energy
We put the dot motif of the established brand to work. On the website, a dot would attach to each visitor and show up to others as they move between exhibition areas. We let the dots get visually busy, mingling in the presence of other dots from other visitors. The dots persist a bit after their visitor leaves, dropping evidence that yes, people are seeing the work.
Add in some retro marquees for major sections, hot-colour animated buttons and a a live events calendar, and it feels like things are really happening. In subsequent years, as in-person events returned, we removed the dots feature and focussed more on a simple presentation space than online gathering.
Celebrating Together
It’s not a party if you can’t talk to each other. We added threaded commenting to student projects with posting and reading limited to graduating students. Each comment linked to the commenter’s project, opening a new discovery paths across The Show, and made students in the comments instantly recognizable to each other.
It’s also not a party without music. The Mixtape feature adds an optional space to each project where students can drop a single YouTube link to a meaningful song. On launch, the entries flow into a public Mixtape page that plays seamlessly via YouTube’s JavaScript API.
Platform and Process
The combination of reusable technology, documentation, and workflows that we defined and refined have become a permanent infrastructure. Because these project showcases remain online, they’ve turned an in-person and ephemeral experience into a celebration that can be experienced by those outside Vancouver, and can endure as part of ECU’s legacy.