Ravensbourne Students' Union

Beyond the audit, I ran one-to-one interviews with the RSU president, vice president, and staff — supplemented by informal conversations with students — to understand:

The existing navigation reflected how the RSU organised itself internally — not how students think or what they come looking for. The restructure was guided by a single principle: every label should map directly to a student need.

Navigation-only index pages were removed. Labels were rewritten in plain, student-facing language. Sections like Diversity and Inclusion, Governance, and Strategic Priorities were consolidated into more meaningful categories. Clubs & Societies was elevated to the top level given how often students asked about it. Course Reps — one of the most-asked-about topics — became a dedicated page. Shop was removed following an organisational change.

Each label is distinct, student-facing, and maps to a clear area of need.

A recurring pattern emerged across the audit and research: students were emailing staff for information that already existed — buried in lengthy internal documents, or simply never surfaced on the site. The solution, applied consistently across several sections, was to distill that complexity into structured, searchable FAQs built around the questions students and staff actually asked.

For Clubs & Societies, this meant working through a 20+ page societies handbook and restructuring it into an FAQ organised by the questions staff received most often — how to join, how to start a society, how to claim reimbursement. The page flow follows frequency of need: find a society → start a society → downloadable resources → FAQs. What previously required a multi-day email chain is now self-serve.

The same principle was applied to Student Voice and Elections. Content had been scattered across Governance, Student Voice STAARs, and Current Elections with no clear relationship between them. Each was consolidated into a single, coherent page — FAQs extracted from the handbooks, key information and downloadable resources brought together in one place.

Students can now find everything they need — getting involved, understanding how elections work, or accessing the right documents — without piecing it together from across the site.

Two of the most-asked-about areas had no functional pages at all.

Events existed in the navigation but the page was completely blank. I designed and built a full event listing with category filtering, date filtering, and keyword search — so students can find what's coming up, filter by interest, and browse past events. Each event has its own detail page, with registration links where applicable.

Course Reps didn't exist on the site at all. Finding a rep previously meant emailing staff, who would manually search a spreadsheet for each enquiry. A static list would have been equally unusable given the volume and variety of courses. I built a searchable directory organised by department and course, with real-time filtering by department, course name, or rep name.

The old homepage opened with a looping three-column GIF, followed by an empty news feed and a blank events section — the worst possible first impression for a student visiting for the first time.

The redesign is built around the academic calendar. During welcome season the hero features a countdown clock, giving new students an immediate sense of arrival — followed by a short video introducing the union, then overviews of each main section with direct links.

A news and blog section was deliberately left out. Without a dedicated resource to maintain it consistently, it would have become another source of outdated content — the same problem the redesign set out to fix.

The homepage now does what it should: orient students quickly and point them where they need to go.

The existing site's visual language was a significant part of the problem. Typography was dated and poorly suited to digital display; several colour combinations failed contrast checks. The redesign established a cohesive visual system.

The teal keeps a connection to the union's existing green, while the palette as a whole moves the brand somewhere more contemporary and student-facing. A pink-to-teal gradient runs consistently across hero sections, headers, and CTAs — a recognisable visual thread without relying on complex decoration. All combinations were checked against contrast requirements.

Exo — geometric and direct — suits an art-and-technology institution; Poppins keeps body copy clean, rounded, and approachable. A clear five-level hierarchy (H1 through caption) was defined and applied consistently across every page.