4 minutes reading
In March 2020 my team received a request to build the website for EPAS, that stands for European Parliament Ambassador School Programme.
The website's goal is to inform students and professors from the schools around all Europe about this program. In this way they can acquire knowledge on EU Institutions, processes and values. The main challenges I faced with my colleagues were:
To meet deadlines and define all requirements we proceeded as follows:
It was a big effort as for the first time we carried on the whole work within my team from home due to Covid-19 restrictions. We adapted to virtual collaboration and we built a solid website relying on internal software.
EPAS was published online 1 year after the first meeting. It might seem a long time. In reality because of copywriting, translations and some EU burocratic procedures usually it takes even longer.
We got great feedbacks and I felt happy to see the final result online in such a short timespan.
UX/UI designer
March 2020 - May 2020
Wireframes, Mockups, Accessibility.
EPAS prototype
Figma
Nicolas Wierzejewski: Webmaster Head of Unit
Piotr Szlatchta: Senior Graphic Designer
Laurent Crombé: Web Integrator
I curated the whole design from the first wireframes to high-fidelity mockups. Doing so I went through different design iterations and refined stakeholders’ requirements.
To finalise the design I had several reviews with the senior graphic designer of my team and the main developer. I’m proud of this project as it contributes to offer young generations opportunities I never had access to and to share democratic EU values.
With my team we received the request to build EPAS website in early March 2020.
I was living in Brussels at that time and I still remember how bad I felt for my family and friends when Italy government declared lockdown.
Two weeks later Belgium declared the same measure and everything felt so uncertain. Until then I worked and collaborated with my colleagues only in the office.
Nonetheless, we quickly adapted to remote working and we kicked-off the project using videocalls and Figma. Not even Covid-19 could stop us!
Since the first meetings we understood that the stakeholders needed guidance. In fact they didn’t know exactly which and how many contents we needed to publish inside the website.
We were also a bit under pressure because of some time constraints that were given us.
Thus we decided to have 2 design reviews every week to guide the stakeholders, show them the latest updates and validate proposals.
This strategy proved to be effective as we noticed that the work proceeded smoothly. The stakeholders started to be more aware of their input importance in terms of editorial choices and content management.
We can only achieve good results with such forms of collaboration!
Given some constraints and some open points we decided to use scalable designs whenever possible.
From contents lists to contents download, number of schools enrolled in the program and other resources.
After some iterations we crafted specific components like the Accordion one and the Image-Text-Link blocks that hit our scalability goals.
I'd like to highlight that while designing we kept in mind accessibility standards and multi-language constraints. These elements are key for EP communication guidelines.
Last but not least, we finalised the design after some reviews with the main developer.
We chose a CMS software to allow the stakeholders to input independently all different contents in all the required languages.
Again, our choices paid off. In fact all components could accomodate different textual lengths and file formats. Mission accomplished.
The website was published online from March 2021 until January 2023.
Now a new version it's available at this link but you can see the way it was before at this Figma prototype. Many of the elements and the layout are still pretty much the same ;)
Thanks to a scalable design and a CMS the stakeholders can use it and update the contents independently. This allows an empowered communication and cost-efficent maintenance.
As said above I’m proud of this project as it contributes to offer young generations opportunities I never had access to and to share EU values like peace and integration.
I love projects like EPAS that can have a concrete impact in the world. My ambition for the future is to work on projects that address climate change, sustainability, waste recycling and renewable energy.
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