As part of their digital transformation, UNSW aimed to migrate their many Drupal instances to one Adobe Experience Manager instance, while upgrading their brand and user experience. I facilitated the design, development and management of their new Global Experience Language (GEL) and design system framework. This provided the foundation for AEM’s core components and the design templates that would subsequently be used by the website authors in the future.
Overview
Design Guide
View the full design guide on UNSW Gelato. Contact me for a run through.
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When I started my role at UNSW as a Senior UX Designer in 2018, I quickly realised that UNSW owned more than 2000 public facing websites. Every school, faculty, research centre etc. had their own website. This was in high contrast to my previous job at Laureate Education, which only owned about a dozen. To reduce double work, I placed every new UI element inside a library in Sketch from the beginning, so that they would be easily accessible from every new project. Over time, this slowly grew into a Global Experience Language or GEL with foundations set up as styles and components set up as symbols.
At the same time, the dev team commenced developing their own version of a multisite on Drupal 8, so that updating one website would automatically update all others too. They named it the Global Experience Framework, or GEF. All new websites from then onwards would be deployed using this framework.
Soon after, a new digital transformation strategy mandated that all websites would migrate to Adobe Experience Manager while undergoing a complete digital brand refresh in line with the new UNSW branding.
To incorporate these changes in my design system on Sketch, I started treating each GEL version as its own entity. UNSW1.0 became the GEL for Drupal 8/GEF, UNSW2.0 became the GEL for Drupal 8/GEF websites with minor updates to reflect the brand refresh and UNSW3.0 became the re-imagined GEL for Adobe Experience Manager completely in line with the new brand. Together, this formed the Gelato design system framework, read more about this framework here.
