Build in Drupal
Custom built in Drupal 8 and Bootstrap
Advance faceted search
We implemented a multi-parameter faceted search to improve the discoverability of content
Highly scalable and available architecture
The site is fully equipped to deal with extreme traffic spikes
Overview
Australia is venturing into the space sector and there are a lot of enthusiasts who are keen to learn and join the conversation, events, news, research on the Space world but don’t have a common platform for doing that. Space Australia was born to fill that void. SwitchCase was engaged to develop a user-friendly portal to bring together community, scientists, research scholars, and enthusiasts who share this common interest in Space research
Challenge
The biggest challenge that we had was to understand what features users want and how they would like to use the platform. Being the first one in the market comes with the disadvantage that there are no products to get inspiration from.
Additionally, the quite diverse personas that we identified meant that we have to put a lot of thought into the language, IA, and type of content that we put. An astrophysicist will have completely different expectations compared to an enthusiast.
Solution
After the intensive design, UX, and IA research we zeroed down on a structure that was scalable, will cater to all the audiences, and was accessible. We spent a lot of time refining the faceted search capability, Taxonomy, and categorisation as suggested in the research.
The Website was developed in Drupal 8 and hosted on the Patheon platform. The build cycle is fully automated using CI and CD tools.
Outcome
We launched the website in late 2019. Ever since its launch a lot of authors have come forward and expressed interest in writing for it. We have news, events, and articles to suit every persona and are also working on a decentralised authoring mechanism with workflows.
The platform has received tremendously positive feedback and had been featured by major news outlets, very recently in SMH.
