The Life Course Centre publishes world-class social science research committed to tracking and understanding the experiences of Australians facing disadvantage in their daily lives.
With a new ARC Centre of Excellence launch and fresh federal funding incoming, they needed a site that actually worked, for researchers, collaborators, and the public alike.
The site was losing people before they found anything
Analytics told a clear story. Bounce rates were high on mobile. Drop-off was concentrated on the homepage. User feedback from staff and connected researchers confirmed the rest: navigation dead-ends, accessibility issues, walls of text, no clear pathways forward.
The highest-traffic pages were Research and Home, exactly where people were getting stuck. The opportunity wasn't cosmetic. The underlying structure needed to change.
Content lived across separate pages, forcing reloads and fragmenting discovery.
The most consequential structural decision was replacing category pages with persistent filtering. Moving to AJAX filter-based workflows kept users in a single context, reduced cognitive load, and made research genuinely explorable.
We also reworked the taxonomy to match how researchers and external visitors actually search, not how the organisation categorised things internally. That distinction mattered.
Rather than treating WordPress as a limitation, the template hierarchy was mapped to inform design, ensuring every intended pattern was achievable without development overruns.
That decision alone kept the project on schedule for a hard external deadline.
A lightweight component library bridged design and development, reducing handoff ambiguity and maintaining consistency across both dynamic and static content pages.
The site launched with the new centre in March 2022.
154% increase in total users
161% increase in total sessions
200% increase in session duration
28% decrease in bounce rate
600%+ increase in Members page views
Given the navigation overhaul, user mental models for finding journal articles or researcher profiles weren't formally validated, only inferred from analytics and competitive evaluation. Moderated research earlier in the project would have sharpened assumptions before they became structural decisions.