Design system

92Y - officially the 92nd Street Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association - is a world-class cultural institution with an absolutely enormous array of programs and services, collectively serving hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Many New Yorkers aren’t aware of the full scope of the institution. Most would know it as a leading performing arts center, with a renowned series of conversations and literary readings. For others, it’s a religious community center, a place to gather on the High Holy Days. People of all ages take advantage of its classes in subjects from jewelry-making to dance to career development. There’s also a nursery school, a senior center, a fitness club, educational outreach programs for New York City’s public schools, an array of summer camps for children, and even a swim team. And some literally call it home: 92Y offers safe and affordable housing for students and interns.

Any one of these programs might be the entire mission of another organization with an entire website dedicated to it. But there’s only one 92Y, and only one 92y.org. The website needs to be many things to many people, just like the institution itself.

Partnering with the in-house team

Because of the strength of 92Y’s in-house web team and their longstanding investment in their existing Kentico codebase, this project became a close collaboration between our two teams.

Made provided expertise in information architecture, user experience, responsive design, and Tessitura-integrated AngularJS widgets, while 92Y’s in-house developers focused on implementing this work in their CMS. Both teams worked to a unified plan and acted as a cohesive unit. This structure let Made provide the expertise 92Y needed, without introducing redundancy in skill sets or effort.

A responsive redesign and pattern library

Our first job was to deliver a responsive redesign of the site, including careful information-architecture work and navigation design to ensure that users could quickly and intuitively find their way to the site sections that interested them.

Made’s designers directly designed many key pages, but for an institution the size of 92Y, we also needed to deliver a way to quickly construct new on-brand pages. To enable this, we delivered a comprehensive library of reusable components that could be used as building blocks for any number of new web designs.

A dynamic event and class finder

The sheer volume of events and classes at 92Y necessitated a better way for users to filter and find ones that might interest them. Made built on top of existing Tessitura-integrated event finder functionality, extending its filtering abilities, refining the design, and increasing its performance.

As users interact with these filters, the URL updates in real time. This ensures users can return to exactly the filtered view they were looking at. Coupled with a feature that enables 92Y to include curated content at the top of listings for certain filtered views, this also lets the team quickly create landing pages featuring particular groupings of events and classes.