Regional development
Pacific Data Hub
A regional gateway to data about the Pacific, supporting Pacific Island countries and their partners.
Link Digital doesn’t just implement the world’s leading open-source data management platform. We build and improve it.
Most data portals are usually judged on how well users can download data. A better criteria is the portal’s overall usability. User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) design is the practice of shaping how people search, filter, preview, and download datasets from your portal. Link Digital brings user experience design to CKAN and open data platforms, combining interface design with a deep knowledge of how the public sector and research data are structured and consumed.
A portal can hold thousands of high-value datasets and still go unused. Common failure points include:
The result is a platform that meets its publishing obligation but not its actual purpose.
Organising catalogues, topics, and navigation so large datasets stay easily findable.
Faceted search, filtering, and results layouts attuned to how your audience actually looks for data.
Dataset and resource pages with clear previews, metadata, and download options that reduce guesswork.
Interfaces built to recognised accessibility standards from the start, not retrofitted.
Consistent, reusable components for CKAN and other platforms.
Usability sessions with the people who will actually use the portal.
Charts, interactive graphs, and geospatial views and mapping.
Commenting and contribution workflows for teams working on the portal.
Five steps from understanding your users to a live, usable portal. Each step ends with something you can review.
We identify who uses the portal (data managers, researchers, journalists, citizens) and what they want to do.
User personas & journeysIf it’s an existing portal, we review it against key usability and accessibility benchmarks.
UX & WCAG audit reportWe produce interface designs and interactive prototypes for you to review.
Clickable prototypeWhere possible, we validate our designs with real users and refine them before build.
Usability test findingsWe work with your platform team to build the design into the live portal.
Live portalGood portal design is not only visual. It adheres to the standards that make data usable:
The W3C accessibility standard for web content. We design to recognise WCAG conformance levels so portals can be easily used with assistive technology.
A W3C vocabulary to make data catalogues interoperable. We design discovery experiences that work with standardised DCAT friendly metadata.
(Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). Our design work supports findability and accessibility in practice, not just in policy.
Regional development
A regional gateway to data about the Pacific, supporting Pacific Island countries and their partners.
Research
University of Manitoba’s research data hub, sharing freshwater data and environmental research data.
Environment
An open hub for water monitoring data across the Columbia Basin, shared by communities and researchers.
Government
Open data catalogue, bringing together datasets from government agencies in one place.
It is the design of how people search, browse, understand, and download data on a portal, so that publishing data leads to real re-use. It covers search, catalogues, topics, and navigation, accessibility, and usability.
No. CKAN is our core expertise, but we also design for other open data platforms and custom-built portals.
We do both. For existing portals, we start with a UX and accessibility audit, then improve the experience step by step without disrupting your users.
We design to recognise WCAG conformance levels. The exact level and any jurisdiction-specific obligations are pre-agreed with each client before we start work.
We review your requirements before we start the project with a discovery session to identify your portal’s bottlenecks and pain points and what your desired outcomes are. Contact our team through “Talk to our team”. We will run a short discovery call to understand your portal and goals, then propose a scope and timeline.