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The brief
The mission of the Stone Centre at UCL is to advance research and teaching to provide a clear, accessible understanding of the causes of wealth inequality and its economic and political consequences.
The Centre pairs the CORE project - which is changing economics education globally - with the research powerhouse of the UCL Economics Department. As a publisher of original research and distributor of curated research from like-minded sources, it serves researchers and academics on one hand, and instructors, students and the interested public on the other.
Its key point of difference from the other seven Stone Centres around the world is that it makes education and research equal partners - developing research into accessible teaching and learning materials, and ensuring neither strand operates in isolation from the other.
The challenge
The Co-Directors, Wendy Carlin and Imran Rasul, had a clear vision: users arriving to access research should be made aware of the educational materials produced from it, and encouraged to engage. Users arriving for educational materials should be drawn toward the research that underpinned them. Giving both equal weighting - and actively coaxing users into journeys between the two - was the central priority of the brief.
The other seven Stone Centres around the world don't serve as particularly strong shop fronts. They're research-focused and not well known outside academic circles. The UCL Stone Centre wanted to break that mould - creating a clean, engaging experience that would appeal to a broader audience including the interested public, not just specialists.
Our approach
We started, as always, with user research - getting to know target audiences, their experience of other research-publishing websites, their goals, pain points and journeys. That insight underpinned everything that followed.
From there we mapped user journeys and UX wireframes, built a prototype and tested it with users. A few tweaks later, we moved into creative design. The brief had some specific constraints worth noting: the site needed to feel closely related to the CORE website; it couldn't lean too heavily on imagery given the challenges of sourcing relevant visuals for economics content; and it needed to feature one specific image that painted a stark real-world picture of wealth inequality. Simple, intuitive and uncluttered throughout.
After the initial design phase we tested again - gathering insight into how to make it easier for users to find what they needed, and ensuring the cross-referencing between research and education was working as intended.
The site was built in Webflow and went live in early 2022. Since then we've continued working with the Stone Centre on UX optimisations, new features and additional components.
"We love working with Team Bravand - they're friendly, responsive, collaborative, and have created a website that we're really proud of. They understood our vision and delivered something that genuinely serves our audiences."
Giacomo Piccoli, Researcher, Stone Centre at UCL / The CORE Project
Working on a content-rich site that needs to serve very different audiences at once?
Audience mapping and UX is where we do our best work. Get in touch with the Bravand team.
