OCAL

Odia Cultural Association London is a cultural organization engaged in promoting Odia culture (State of Odisha, India) in London, UK. Primary activities include organizing and celebrating Odia festivals and other Indian festivals in the UK. They cater to Odia diaspora primarily as well as other similar sections of the Indian diaspora. These events are attended by the organization members as well as non-member participants who may be attending temporarily.  

Overview

I had a conversation with the chief of the organization who reached out to me, asking to design and create the official website for the organization. Their main priorities were

• To make it easy to connect with their audience and communicate their core message. They believed a website would make it easier.

• To have a CMS that can be easily maintained by members without any technical knowledge.

Research

As per my discussions, it was clear that they the following - 

1. A website which does the usual official website thing,

2. This has to be a NoCode solution, as members managing don't generally have any technical knowledge.

Further to this, I also did some research by interacting with the existing members so as to gather their ideas and thoughts to keep the result aligned with the mental model of the members. 

I designed a short questionnaire with the questions I had with multiple choice answers and shared it among the members. Basis the answers, the following is what I understood - 

• The website should be a portal that should prioritize events and their activities as that is what the organization mostly did all year round. 

• Also, they wanted the website to be an archive of past events as well as their annual magazine which is a summary of all the events of the year.

• Finally, they wanted the website to also increase their outreach among the existing diaspora resulting in more members/event participants.

Audience

Predominantly Odia Diaspora  & similar Indian diaspora, including present members and non-members.

Age groups: Quite vast, includes people in 20s / 30s as well as 40s / 50s. 

• 20s/ 30s: Includes new professionals who migrate to UK for professional reasons. They are habitual of these festivals and culture and generally find the void when they move to a different country. 

• 40s / 50s: This may also include professionals or others who simply want to participate as they want to expose their children who are born in a different country to be well connected with the Indian culture. 

Basis these inputs, I created the following user personas to guide me through the thought process of the audience.

User Flow

Ideation / Solution

After collecting all these inputs, I started ideating as to how this can be achieved in the best possible way. The following was clear in my mind - 

• Events & activities will be the most important part of the website

• Upcoming events are to be showcased in a prominent way, past events are to be archived for viewing purposes

• WordPress to be used to build the website as -

  • 1. It's a robust NoCode platform that can be used easily and scaled using plugins whenever required

    2. Themes for such purposes are easily available hence with some customization, the necessary result can be achieved. 

    3. Also, this being free and open source, saves expenses in licensing fees