Dairy AU | Creating One Digital Community for Multiple User Segments

Laura Smith
Sep 4, 2024
3 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Bringing together two different websites into one Community Hub, with a fresh & modern application of existing brand styling.

Project: Dairy Australia, Community Website

My Role: Senior UX Designer Expertise: Workshop Facilitation, User Experience Mapping, UX Research, UI Design, Visual Design, Design Presentation

Overview

Dairy Australia is an industry body that plays a key role to a number of different user segments, including the Farmers, Consumers, Health Practitioners and those looking to join become employed in the industry. As part of a larger project to re-platform the three websites of DA, they required support to combine two of these sites into one Community hub for all of their user segments, excluding the Farmers which would retain its own dedicated site.

Industry Recognition

The Dairy Australia project received a Silver Sydney Design Award in the Digital Community category, 2025.

The Dairy Australia Community website was recognised with a Good Design Award in the Digital, Web Design & Development Category, described as "a confident and well-structured platform that brings clarity, trust and warmth to a complex multi-audience space...design maturity is reflected in it's scalability and user empathy."

As Senior UX Designer, I lead the facilitation of a series of discovery & design workshops with the client's multi-disciplinary stakeholder team, to determine requirements, page structure & content mapping. This was followed by a refreshed application of the existing brand styling to create a friendly & fun new website design.

I lead a series of discovery & design workshops with the client's multi-disciplinary stakeholder team, to determine requirements, page structure & content mapping.

Initially the brief was to provide concepts for two pages of the site which ended up growing to seven pages, due to the clients enthusiasm to expand the project.

Leveraging an existing component library together with several newly designed components, the favoured visual design concept was applied to produce final high fidelity designs.

Project stats

My Impact

Planned and delivered a series of UX discovery & design virtual workshops with the client team, which included:
- User experience mapping workshop, mapping the end to end decision journey for four user segments
- Content mapping & page narrative blocking, to determine the ideal page structure for five key pages of the new site
- Visual design briefing and concept proposal workshop, in which I presented three visual concept mood boards, to align with the client on a proposed direction of the brand application

Produced the lo-fidelity wireframes, both mobile & desktop, for seven site pages covering the home page and priority L1 and L2 landing pages of the new community website.

Lead the visual design research and concepting activities to produce three proposed concepts in the form of moodboards, which I then presented to the client.

Applied the chosen visual design concept to two page wireframes and presented these high fidelity page concepts to the client, gathering feedback and implementing design amendments.

Designed new mobile-first components for priority site pages including the Dairy products and Dairy Destinations pages, which delivered on the client's brief to provide easy-to-manage site pages & components that would beautifully showcase a range of content.

Three visual design concepts were presented to the client in the form of moodboards set out in Miro. Each were based on selected colours from the existing brand colour palette and then built out with new colours, design principles and supporting visual references.

Outcomes

Several new components were designed to present & cross-promote different types of DA content. At the same time, they needed to be very practical and allow the internal marketing team to easily manage content updates.

Custom component design allowed for a tailored UX for each of the target user segments, such as consumers of Dairy products seeking recipes and inspiration to use ingredients in new ways.

Results

The new Dairy Australia Community website design received a Silver Sydney Design Award in Digital, for the Community category.

The Dairy Australia Community site design was awarded a Sydney Design Award for the Digital Community category.

Challenges & Learnings

The most significant challenge of this project was to deliver and facilitate virtual workshops with quite a large group of the client stakeholders. More and more however, virtual workshops are becoming the norm with in-person workshops becoming more of a budget & timing luxury.

As I regularly get the opportunity to plan and facilitate client workshops, I always look to take the learnings from the challenges my team & myself experience and apply these to future sessions; being thoughtful of how I can best plan for different client needs and have a clear vision of what each workshop needs to achieve.

For any questions regarding this project or any of my other work, please do not hesitate to get in contact.