City of Sydney | What’s On
A user-generated-content platform showcasing Sydney through the eyes of a local
MY ROLEDesign Team Leadership
Research, Workshops, Strategy
Information Architecture, Systems Mapping
Wireframing, Prototyping, User Testing
User Interface Design
Development Oversight
LIVE SITEwhatson.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au‘What’s On’ by the City of Sydney is a unique digital platform for Sydney-siders and tourists alike, providing the means to create, discover and share a collection of awe-inspiring events from across the city, providing the truest glimpse of ‘Sydney through the eyes of a local’.
Frank Digital had already created the original ‘What’s On’ platform in 2014, growing its initial audience of around 270K users to an impressive 3 million unique visitors a year by 2019. Building on this success, Frank Digital was again commissioned by the City of Sydney to reimagine the platform from the ground up, introducing cutting edge machine learning and streamlining the search, filtering and user-generated-content upload processes.
As Head of UX, I took responsibility for the research, ideation, prototyping and user testing phases of this project, working hand-in-hand with Frank Digital’s development team to formulate the approach. We integrated Google’s machine learning and AI algorithms to create a unique event upload system that automatically checks images and text to ensure the best quality content is submitted. We then designed a completely bespoke content management process enabling the City of Sydney’s editorial team to easily create new event features, article pages and content collections, all driven by the Contentful headless CMS.
The revised What’s On launched in late 2019 and has been hugely successful. Despite COVID creating a number of challenges for events across the city, the platform has thrived, growing daily users and strengthening the City of Sydney’s impressive digital ecosystem.
