The University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne
Unifying the digital experience during a faculty merger
As the University of Melbourne formed the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, bringing together the Victorian College of the Arts and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, I led a strategic design engagement to unify the Faculty’s digital presence.
The work focused on understanding the needs of students, staff, and partners during a period of organisational change, and translating those insights into a clear digital service journey and implementation roadmap. The outcome was a cohesive, user-centred direction to guide the redesign of five faculty websites under a unified brand.
Role
Strategic Design Lead
Organisation
CX Lavender Design Agency
Focus
Digital strategy, service design, merger transition
“Working with the team helped us make sense of a complex transition. They really got to the heart of what our students and staff needed, and helped us bring it all together in a way that actually felt like us.
–Project stakeholder
The challenge
The creation of the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music represented a significant structural and cultural shift. While VCA and MCM each had strong identities, their digital experiences were fragmented across multiple websites, structures, and content models.
The challenge was to:
- Support a smooth digital transition during a complex merger
- Align faculty and university objectives while respecting distinct cohorts
- Unify five websites into a coherent, navigable ecosystem
- Ensure the new digital experience reflected the Faculty’s value propositions
This required shared understanding, clarity of purpose, and service-level thinking.
Our research scope:
27 research participants
6 workshops
6 interviews
My role & responsibilities
As Strategic Design Lead, I:
- Led discovery and strategy to support the Faculty’s digital transition
- Partnered closely with faculty stakeholders across students, staff, and leadership
- Facilitated interviews and workshops to surface needs, expectations, and risks
- Translated insights into service journeys, IA direction, and delivery guidance
- Embedded with teams to support adoption of human-centred design practices
Approach & thinking
The work was grounded in human-centred and strategic design, with a strong emphasis on alignment during change.
Key elements included:
- Stakeholder interviews across key cohorts to understand needs and concerns
- Scoping workshops to map current-state journeys and merger impacts
- Assessment of how digital experiences could support identity, clarity, and continuity
- Service journey mapping to connect content, navigation, and user intent
- Integration of journeys and insights directly into information architecture and content planning
By working closely with the Faculty on-site, the focus was on enabling confident decision-making.
–Student exhibition
–Synthesis
–Team retro
–Student workshop post-it note
Outcomes & impact
The engagement provided a clear foundation for delivery during a period of transition:
- Defined a shared, user-centred digital service journey for the new Faculty
- Provided a structured implementation roadmap to guide redesign across five websites
- Clarified priorities and dependencies to support coordinated delivery
- Delivered user stories, design patterns, and IA direction for implementation teams
- Strengthened internal capability in human-centred and strategic design methods
- Improved alignment between digital, content, and service planning efforts
“This project was about uniting people and stories.
–Project reflection
