United States Studies Centre – Local Think Tank on the Global Stage

The challenge was to drive credibility through a strong brand presence, and showcase the USSC’s significant, high-quality output - becoming a shining example for all think-tanks globally. The platform also needed to serve as a recruitment tool for their academic programs at Sydney University, so there were several target audiences to consider. On the backend, we needed to deliver flexibility and scalability and empower the internal team to make seamless updates without development support.

We established stronger design principles to create a better editorial experience, our new system elevating the USSC’s presence and credibility. Through 1-1 interviews with all audiences, we uncovered a need for simplification of how research topics are discovered, to align with user needs rather than internal classifications. Our UX strategy was to keep the most topical and searched for research areas easily accessible in the navigation, encouraging exploration of the huge body of research the USSC outputs. We also highlighted the most recent and popular content on the homepage, grouped by category.

Commercial impact is driven by the creation of a consistent brand identity across channels - driving brand equity and a stronger brand presence, helping to build a case for funding from the various bodies that support the USSC, a non-profit public company. Our ambition of becoming a think tank playing on the global stage has been achieved, with the new platform outshining many direct competitors. The new platform also creates a compelling student experience, clearly highlighting how studying at USSC will help shape your career. Video interviews and testimonials from alumni help students visualise the benefits, driving enrollments and tuition fees.

A powerful search and extensive filtering system helps the user find very nuanced information, to cater to the many audience groups, searching very different types of content. You can filter by date, topic, category, the expert who wrote the content, or the USSC program the content sits within. Search queries scan page titles as well as all tags (filters), returning highly accurate results. We also created a comprehensive tagging system, which crosslinks articles and research papers with relevant experts and upcoming events, surfacing relevant and contextual content and drawing attention to the breadth of the Centre’s content. For lengthy research papers and reports, we created a sticky navigation showing the article’s table of contents, which guides users through the executive summary and beyond, or quick access back to the top of the page. This is automatically generated in the CMS, based upon the headings from the report, making it very low effort for USSC’s content editors. The student cohort have a different mindset to the think tank audience, and the ‘Study’ section of the platform reflects this - the tone of the design becomes more playful and leans on the bolder tones from the colour palette.