NSW Climate Data Portal
Designed an open data portal for the NSW Government, making petabytes of climate data publicly accessible.
“Damir has the experience and initiative to take on a brief and work with all the key stakeholders to get a successful outcome.”
The Challenge
The NSW Climate Data Portal needed to make petabytes of climate data available to researchers, emergency services, government agencies, media, and the general public. As the sole designer on a team of engineers and government stakeholders, my job was to synthesise competing requirements into a single coherent design direction. The portal is built on CKAN, an open-source data platform, and needed to comply with the NSW Government design system while solving for the unique challenges of navigating and downloading massive datasets.
Design Direction
I leveraged the existing NSW Government design system to accelerate stakeholder approval, speed up development, and ensure accessibility out of the box. The core design challenge was scale — each dataset could range from gigabytes to petabytes. Users needed to find specific datasets quickly through faceted search, then download only the data relevant to their region of interest rather than pulling entire files. Reports interpreted raw data into human-readable summaries, making the portal accessible beyond just data scientists.
User Testing
I ran two remote tests with 20 target users: a tree test to validate the navigation structure and a click test to evaluate the homepage layout. The tree test returned a 71% success rate and the click test averaged 80% task completion — strong signals that the information architecture was working. I also ran moderated sessions via Zoom, observing participants completing tasks in real time and compiling the findings into a report of actionable recommendations for the next iteration.
Outcome
The portal was delivered in a few months — from stakeholder analysis through design iterations, prototyping, and user testing. It now makes NSW's climate data publicly accessible, enabling better-informed decisions across government, research, and emergency services.