Website Relaunch for UAE Anniversary

Relaunch of the UAE’s 50th Anniversary Website

UX Design / Conversational Design / Accessibility

In time for the UAE’s 50th anniversary in 2021 and coinciding with Expo 2020 in Dubai, the Berlin design agency think moto had been assigned to create the website UAE Year of the 50th with a strong focus on user-generated content and storytelling. Throughout the year, residents of the UAE were encouraged to contribute their own stories and content, which were then being curated and displayed on the website – in both English and Arabic.

The website was set up to first focus on the last 50 years of the UAE, then the present and eventually the upcoming 50 years and what those might bring. For the start of the “2021” (or “present”) phase, the website needed to be relaunched so that it could combine all three phases and their existing (as well as upcoming) content while still keeping the concept of past/present/future clearly visible (each phase also had its own brand design). This relaunch was my main task during this project.

The solution was to provide a timeline on the homepage that served as access to each of the three phases. This timeline needed to be displayed right-to-left for the Arabic version (see screenshots above).

Entering one of those phases opened a sub-page within the homepage showing the phase’s specific brand design and containing all the phase’s content – see screenshot below for the “1971” overview.

I also conceptually created the features for the “2021” phase of the timeline. This phase mainly revolved around letters that residents had been asked to write to their own future selves:

In general, my tasks were:

Creating a new homepage and navigational approach for the existing website
Creating new features for the existing website, including a detailed submission/uploading process for user-generated content (see description and screenshots above)
Wireframing and prototyping (clickdummy) in Sketch and InVision, for both desktop and mobile views
Content management, especially of copybooks used for translation and development
Accessibility concept with focus on keyboard access and screen readers
Conversational design for a WhatsApp chatbot

Link to live website: UAE Year of the 50th

Agency: think moto