Designing a sustainability youth festival website for EB Impact
From insight to interface: a user-led design for EB Impact’s inaugural sustainability youth festival.
2.5 weeks
User Research, Information Architecture, Content Design and Strategy, UX Copywriting, Usability Testing
Context
For EB Impact's upcoming Sustainability Youth Festival (TSYF), they wanted to design a website that would engage both educators and students, making it easier for them to access festival information, explore events and join their inaugural challenges.
My role
In this project, I led user research to uncover audience needs, motivations, and pain points. These insights directly informed the website’s design, functionality, information architecture, and content strategy.
User insights that shaped the design
#1: Both students and teachers wanted a visually appealing website with interactive features.
Design choice
Used bright colours, modern typography, and imagery to make the site visually engaging on first glance. dates.
Used expanding content sections and hover-over effects to help users view large volumes of information in digestible chunks.
#2: Teachers wanted downloadable materials to easily share or reference challenge details.
Design choice
Prominently placed a download button at the top of the page for teachers to easily access key competition details in a PDF format.
#3: Users wanted to draw inspiration from examples of previous projects as a benchmark for their own submissions.
Design choice
Create a dedicated Projects page, structured to help users quickly find relevant examples based on their needs.
Placed challenge category buttons at the top of the page that users can simply click and quickly jump to view the projects. This gives users an immediate sense of control over what they see.
Enable users to filter projects by year to accommodate future TSYF editions. This allows our client to easily add new content in future editions of TSYF, ensuring scalability.
Gerald Wong
Executive Director | EB Impact
Key reflections
We chose interviews and usability testing to ground our design decisions in real user needs. These were well-suited for our small user group and helped us to quickly identify pain points - from navigation challenges to gaps in content clarity.
In future projects, I hope to complement these qualitative insights with surveys and A/B testing to gain a more well-rounded view of user behaviour and support more informed design decisions. If TSYF expands its activities in subsequent years, A/B testing can also be more meaningfully applied in subsequent years of TSYF to evaluate different layouts, content formats, or calls-to-action.
Looking ahead
Since this is the first year of TSYF, the website was designed with growth in mind. In future editions, the client can build on this foundation to explore ways to engage students and teachers. Beyond being an information hub for the festival, the website has the potential to become an interactive space for learning, reflection, and action.
Some ideas include:
Educational resources and interactive games to make sustainability topics more engaging and accessible for teachers and students.
A personalised environmental impact tracker, where users can view statistics related to their actions and carbon footprint. This not only raises awareness but also encourages return visits and longer time spent on the site.
