Meld Magazine
UX Design/Web Design
Meld Magazine is an independent not-for-profit media outlet supporting Australia’s diverse international student community. The volunteer-run team is made of both local and international students creating and publishing content to shed light on issues affecting international students and give them a voice to feel at home in Australia.
The Meld team reached out to Mindly to help them design and develop a new platform that would help them publish effective content and support Australia's international student community.
Discovery
We started our human-centred design process with an in-depth discovery workshop with the Meld team. We began learning about their audience, objectives and challenges. We learnt that the team struggled to effectively reach and add value to their audience with the limitations of their existing platform and its user experience.
User Research
We ran qualitative and quantitative user research activities with International students to gain a better understanding of their wants, needs, challenges and experiences as international students in Australia.
Design
We used the insights from research to help us design a meaningful, engaging and valuable news platform experience for international students. We designed, tested and iterated upon user flows, information architecture and low-fidelity prototypes that would enable students easily find and access content that’s relevant to them. A major factor that makes news platforms successful is having an interface that is simple and places the content at the centre of the users’ attention. The content layouts were designed using best industry practices for news platforms.
Development & Launch
The original site was original hosted on Wordpress and we continued to host the content on Wordpress with the rebuild, the frontend was built on Vercel. The Content Management System was improved to give the volunteer-run team reliability and confidence in publishing content. Documentation and a series of informative training videos were provided so that new team members can easily learn how to share consistent content.
Since launch, the new platform has seen impressive results and improvements in engagement and reach. The volunteer-run team has been able to continue publishing that supports international students living in Australia.
International students face a lot of challenges coming to Australia, particularly with trying to adopt a new culture, language and fit in. Meld Magazine provides content, support and a place where international students can feel part of a community.
By designing an accessible and engaging news platform, we helped Meld Magazine improve the engagement they have with their audience, share highly relevant content effectively and positively impact the lives of international students in Australia.
"Everything was wonderful, thanks team! We really appreciated not having to worry about a thing and have Mindly take care of matters on an end to end basis. We appreciated being a part of the conversation and contributing to the final site. Thanks for being all kinds of wonderful to us!"
- Clara Tang, Head of Meld Community