A new design system and website redesign to bring consistency and reduce complexity across one of higher education's largest digital estates.
Project background
The University of Oxford is one of the world's top academic institutions. The University maintains not just its own website, but also a vast digital estate of over 800 different websites for a plethora of institutions that form part of the University, such as several Oxford colleges, museums (such as the Ashmolean) and galleries.
To bring a more consistent experience across their digital estate whilst reducing cost and complexity, the University of Oxford chose Numiko to lead a design project encompassing not just the redesign of the main Oxford University website, but also the development of a comprehensive design system for the entire institution.
This undertaking was part of a broader initiative to enhance the online content experience at Oxford. The program included the redevelopment of the University's Content Management System (CMS) platform, the creation of Oxford's first intranet platform, and a strategic overhaul of content, user experience, and governance planning. The ultimate goal was to significantly improve the experience for both website publishers and end users across the entire digital ecosystem.
The challenge
The digital landscape at Oxford had evolved piecemeal over time, resulting in a fragmented and suboptimal user experience. The University of Oxford sought to use this project to dramatically improve usability and UX standards.
Beyond the usual challenges involved in building an effective, accessible and distinctive university website, the huge scope of the design system presented a complex additional challenge. Any design system for use across multiple websites must strike the right balance between flexibility and consistency. It must be sufficiently flexible to allow digital teams in different organisations to create websites that meet their needs and express their own sub-brands yet also be consistent enough that users feel that these different websites are part of one coherent ecosystem.
Approach
To solve these challenges and deliver an excellent website for Oxford University, as well as the design system for its wider digital estate, we tackled the project in two stages, focusing first on the designs for the University of Oxford’s main website, and using these to inform the designs for the wider design system.
Throughout the project, we worked closely with Oxford's internal teams, fostering a collaborative approach to ensure that designs were not only visually striking but also technically feasible for their internal team of developers.
The Oxford University website
For the main Oxford website, we pushed the digital brand in a new direction. The new design focused on accessibility, clarity, and heritage. This evolution respected Oxford's rich history while positioning the institution as forward thinking and modern.
The redesign delivers a more effective website for Oxford's key user groups, including prospective students, funders, and the global research community. Its clean, simple layout ensures that critical information is easily accessible and intuitively organised.
The Oxford design system
Our design team created the Oxford design system to bring a shared visual and UX language to over 800 websites. With so many different requirements across such a vast digital estate, we had to design the system to be extremely flexible so it could handle all kinds of edge cases.
Museums, galleries, Oxford colleges and academic projects all need different things from their website, and it was crucial that the design system allows them to create their own distinctive sub-brands.
The new design system is built to let content teams choose different colours, typography and elements of the shape of UI elements, such as corner roundness, so they can maintain their site’s own look and feel. It also includes guidance to help content admins make coherent choices, giving them flexibility while nudging them towards combinations that result in a more effective website design.
The Oxford system enables a great deal of flexibility for creating distinctive sub-brands whilst also bringing consistency to the UX experience. UI elements like buttons, toggles and filters all work in a consistent way across the system, improving the experience of users by removing instances where a feature works differently to how they’d expect. This unified UX language makes users feel as though Oxford’s digital estate is all part of one coherent ecosystem. Sites in the estate share a clear family resemblance with Oxweb, but they also differ in deliberate, considered ways. For more details on creating a unified digital estate that allows sub-brands to express themselves, see our article on ‘How to create a consistent digital estate’.
The design system is also built to evolve over time, allowing for the addition of new components as needed. This futureproofing ensures that Oxford's digital presence can grow and adapt to changing needs over time.
Design for 'buildability'
Rather than delivering an 'ah-ha' moment with a big reveal, we worked extremely closely with their team from the start, showcasing work-in-progress designs right from early concepts. We used Figma to demonstrate the modular approach early in the project, showcasing various options within the design system. This early visualisation helped stakeholders understand the potential of the new system and facilitated faster decision-making. It also facilitated feedback incorporation throughout the project lifecycle, keeping the project on track.
What the client says
“I’ve really enjoyed working with Numiko on what’s been an incredibly complex digital transformation programme. The team has consistently been knowledgeable, pragmatic and responsive. I’ve particularly appreciated Numiko’s engagement with emerging priorities like long-term sustainability considerations in design and hosting or our approaches to and use of AI.”