Bringing Big Data to Life
A website for the Data Science Institute that’s far from business as usual
When the Data Science Institute launched in 2013, it was the first pan-university institute of its kind at the University of Virginia. Stretching across disciplines and existing outside of any one school or department, DSI was founded to address the growing opportunities and challenges of Big Data — and invite students, researchers and the general public to collaborate in an increasingly data-driven society.
DSI needed a website that was as cutting edge as it was. The team at DSI asked Journey Group to design and build that site.
The challenge
Nothing about DSI is standard. Nothing about its website could be standard either.
The website needed to embody DSI’s mission.
The site itself needed to invite visitors to feel like data scientists in their own right: making connections and finding meaning from a seemingly disparate array of information.
The Journey Group team also had to navigate how to contextualize this fresh, emerging brand within a historic university. The tie to UVA needed to remain strong, but DSI had to convey its own distinctive identity.
The work also started from scratch: Journey Group had to make a brand-new system for presenting DSI to the world, scrapping all of the old content and architecture and starting with a blank canvas. It was, to say the least, an exciting frontier for a higher-ed project.
With ample creative license and trust from the team at UVA, Journey Group’s digital studio set to work.
The work
Discarding the traditional academic navigational menu was a first step in Journey Group’s architectural strategy. For DSI, only the unconventional would do. A unique navigation and site structure would entice visitors to explore and wonder. The site needed a robust, inherent logic, but it would simultaneously create a feeling of surprise for its users.
Journey Group had a vision for a homepage that communicated that DSI was not just about a master’s program: It was about taking one’s passions, powered by data science, into the real world.
Everything is connected, and the site needed to make those connections in real time.
Accordingly, a straightforward Drupal content management system wasn’t going to cut it for DSI. Journey Group’s developers built a headless content management system instead. Read more about Journey Group’s work decoupling content management with our clients.
The team leaned into interaction design, notably with the homepage’s rotating menu of content. For DSI, Journey Group envisioned a beautifully complex and layered homepage, so that each spin of the rotator displays an overlapping, dynamic gallery of content.
Designers also proposed a fresh color palette for DSI, choosing a vivid yellow and refreshing teals and blues from their brand identity to complement UVA’s signature orange.
Modeling, rather than merely visualizing, DSI’s projects was a top priority. The Journey Group team focused on recasting data science projects in language accessible to laypeople, creating a sustainable template for the DSI team to use as projects are added. From landing pages to personable profile stories, new content was written, and new taxonomies were constructed to support the site’s expansive web of interrelated content.
The result
DSI now has a website that is as fresh and innovative as the institute it represents.
“When we found Journey Group, I felt like there was a lot of understanding, of both the work that had already been done with our brand and also where we wanted to go,” says Arlyn Burgess, associate director for operations and strategic initiatives at the Data Science Institute. “All along the way, someone on the Journey team was able to articulate or actually show us a manifestation of something we could only imagine.
“Everybody at Journey was as excited as we were about how we could bring the DSI brand to life.”
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