The UNSW Research Gateway is a pan-faculty portal which encompases all aspects of research at UNSW, one of Australia’s pre-emminent research universities.
For UNSW, this was a strategic project with clear business objectives to attract, retain and develop leading research staff and students, and to encourage active collaboration with the best on their fields globally. There were numerous sites profiling research projects across the university and the Research Gateway was to consolidate all these sites, reduce admin related enquiries and eliminate information duplication through design and development of a single gateway or portal. We developed a design-led strategy and undertook research with partners (Zumio & Red Rollers) to understand user groups and their needs. This together with co-design activities with stakeholders led to the creation of the Research Gateway concept.
Primary amongst a number of project objectives was tto connect people and projects across the University, creating opportunities for collaboration that would be unlikely to occur otherwise. The result of this highly collaborative project is a singularly engaging and vibrant ‘gateway’ that caters to a range of research questions and inquiries from many different kinds of users. Most importantly it is a credible, usable and authoritative source of information. Digital Eskimo worked closely to manage the build and integration of the new portal across the three year project.