Enhancing usability for Australia’s leading timber knowledge platform

What we did:

Design brief

Forest & Wood Products Australia (FWPA) partnered with Digital Garden to redesign and modernise WoodSolutions — one of Australia’s most referenced resources for timber knowledge, technical guidance and industry education.

With thousands of technical guides, species profiles, and evolving industry programs, the existing website had become increasingly difficult to navigate and maintain. Users struggled to locate information, content quality varied, and FWPA needed a more streamlined way to publish and manage materials.

Digital Garden was engaged to deliver a more intuitive user experience, improve discoverability, and create a scalable platform capable of supporting WoodSolutions’ long-term role as a leading industry knowledge hub.

Deep understanding through research

We began with a comprehensive discovery phase, conducting interviews and workshops with engineers, architects, builders and WoodSolutions advisors. These conversations revealed clear friction points around navigation, search limitations, inconsistent materials, and the lack of tailored pathways for different professional audiences.

Research insights confirmed several core user needs, including easy access to technical guides, transparent learning pathways, species comparison tools, and a simplified supplier search experience. These findings informed a refined information architecture and set the foundation for a content strategy focused on clarity, consistency and relevance.

A modern design system and powerful CMS

The refreshed interface introduces an updated visual direction with cleaner layouts, improved accessibility and a component-based design system to support future growth.

Behind the scenes, FWPA now benefits from:

More efficient content creation and publishing
The ability to retire outdated materials with confidence
Preview tools for quality assurance
Better visibility of content performance

Together, these improvements create a platform that is both easier to manage and more adaptable to the industry’s evolving needs.

Results

The enhanced WoodSolutions website now delivers a clearer, more intuitive experience for built-environment professionals, faster access to high-value technical content, improved visibility of events, webinars and programs, a scalable design system with modern CMS foundations, and space for ongoing enhancement and digital expansion.

Most importantly, the platform is now positioned to support FWPA’s ambition to be Australia’s most trusted source of timber knowledge—strengthening engagement, building trust and elevating the role of wood in sustainable construction.