Low awareness
Some students did not know that DISK studentkår had a website.
DISK studentkår · Case study by Alfons Melander
A redesign of a student union website.
- Role
- UX & Front-end Developer
- Timeline
- Jun 2026-Aug 2026
- Team
- 2 people
Lightweight Discovery
Defining the problem
Before redesigning the site, I did a lightweight discovery phase by asking students what they thought of the existing DISK website.
DSV has around 5,000 enrolled students each semester, with around 1,000 new students arriving every year. Because of that, the website needed to work especially well for first-time visitors who may not know what DISK is or where to begin.
The feedback was informal, but it revealed recurring usability issues. Some students did not know the website existed, while others described it as hard to navigate, cramped on mobile and inconsistent between Swedish and English.
Feedback synthesis
Four issues to design around
Student feedbackConfusing structure
Students who had used the site found it difficult to understand where information lived.
Poor mobile experience
The existing website felt cramped and did not adapt well on smaller screens.
Language inconsistency
Swedish and English content was inconsistent, and some pages had no English version.
Ideation
Exploring the design
FigmaWe explored different ways to make the content easier to scan and navigate. The early concepts focused on simplifying the structure and giving important student information more room on the page.
Early Home Page
Early page design
Refined Direction
Information architecture
Redesign decisions
The goal was to make the website easier to understand before users started reading in detail. We focused on clearer information hierarchy, more space around content and layouts that worked better across screen sizes.
We reduced the site structure from 25 pages to 16 by merging overlapping content and grouping related information together. This made the navigation easier to scan, reduced the number of dropdown items on mobile and created a structure that is easier to maintain in both Swedish and English.
- Clearer page hierarchy
- More breathing room in text-heavy sections
- Responsive layouts for smaller screens
- Navigation focused on common student needs
Implementation tools
Build stack
ElementorPHP
The redesign also had to work within the tools used to build the website. We kept the stack focused around Elementor and used supporting plugins where they solved a clear problem.
Elementor made it possible to build polished pages in a way the client could continue working with after handoff. For the parts that needed more control than the visual editor could provide, I supported the implementation with custom PHP.
Elementor
Used as the base for page building and the visual structure.
ElementsKit
Added more flexible UI blocks and widgets to the build.
Ultimate Addons
Helped create reusable content sections across the site.
TranslatePress
Made it easier to manage Swedish and English content.
Final direction
A clearer theme and identity
The final pages needed to feel like they belonged to the same organization, even when the content changed. I used consistent spacing, repeated section patterns and a more unified visual direction to make the website feel easier to recognize and trust.
Traditions
Sections
Contact
View the live website
The redesigned DISK website is live and maintained by the student union.
Visit DISK