GEM (Global Experience Macquarie) – the University’s innovative design system for bringing consistency to our webpages and digital products – has been recognised with a gold in the Digital-Education category at the 2021 Sydney Design Awards.
The first such system to be rolled out at an Australian university, GEM was custom developed to address the significant design and content disparity across Macquarie’s 10,000+ webpages – including more than 400 different fonts and over 13,000 broken links.
GEM’s positive impact is being felt in many parts of the University including the Faculty of Arts, who recently relaunched their webpages.
“With GEM we are able to showcase teaching and research excellence in the Faculty of Arts in a way that we weren’t able to do before,” says General Manager Neil Durrant. “It’s easier to find our people, engage with the faculty and promote our research.”
“The consistent look and feel, as well as navigation and overall experience, has meant our audiences are responding extremely positively, we are seeing more visits and more engagement with our content. GEM also makes it simpler for our staff to update and maintain our content to a very high quality.”
Macquarie joins names including David Jones and the City of Sydney as 2021 Gold Sydney Design Award winners, cementing the University as one of the most innovative brand marketers in the higher education sector.
“It’s fantastic to see the inspired and meticulous work of our digital, marketing and IT teams being recognised in this way,” says Group Marketing’s Director of Digital Andrew Jayatilake. “But, of course, our biggest satisfaction comes from knowing that we’ve made the digital experience at Macquarie much more enjoyable, both for our website visitors and all our web page editors around campus.
“We’re excited to have re-launched the About section of mq.edu.au last week and we’re looking forward to rolling GEM out across further sections of the Macquarie site over the next 12 months, with ‘Study’ the next section due for launch.”
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