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I project managed and led the design and front-end development of the new corporate website for this United Nations Commission using the Content Management System Drupal.
In addition to designing and front-end developing various portals and web apps, I created digital product development guidelines and formed a digital working group to transform how digital products are generated at ESCWA, with a stronger focus on targeted user community engagement, an iterative project development cycle, intuitive user-flows and interactive tools with focused, meaningful and useful functionality.
Client
United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia
Date
2020–21
Services
Project Management
Digital Design
Design Systems
User Research
Frontend Development
Link
ESCWA had over 200 web portals When I arrived, most with fewer than 100 annual visitors, which had been built without due consideration for purpose, usability, maintenance, cost-effectiveness or audience and promotion.
To address this, I led a Commission-wide process to identify and appreciate digital as co-owned by (and necessarily requiring input from) the Communications, Knowledge Management and Information Technology Divisions. Importantly, a portal approval process was established on a set schedule with months of lead time to product launch.
I then wrote digital branding guidelines to ensure cleaner, more useful and sophisticated interactive products for the Commission to showcase its vital economic research and policy guidance.
Existing portals without sufficient visitor numbers or unique features were either retired or integrated into the main corporate website.
The Digital Product Development Guidelines were then applied to a versatile template for ESCWA portals, with sophisticated interactions for shared featured such as country selection and comparision and data visualization dashboards.
unescwa.org is the second most visited Arabic language site in the UN system outside of un.org. I project managed and led the process of completely overhauling the taxonomy and content-system to put user needs first, and then the process of mapping and migrating tens of thousands of content pieces into the new system.