Ecology Project International
A content audit and strategy for the nonprofit's new website
Ecology Project International is a non-profit organization that engages local communities around the world to take an active role in conservation. They also send U.S. high school students on immersive, educational courses to diverse locations such as Costa Rica, the Galapagos, and Belize. Studio Simpatico worked with EPI to distill and organize their content and objectives into intuitive user flows and wireframes.
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what we did together
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The Challenge
To EPI, the task of redesigning their website was daunting: they needed to address a large number of users with very different priorities (donors, parents, teachers, students, administrators, potential partners, etc.). Their current site housed an overwhelming amount of content to organize and prioritize, and current users were getting lost and confused in their experience.
Discovery
To begin our process, we conducted a content audit of the existing site and met with the EPI staff to understand their goals, business objectives, and content priorities for the new site. We conducted interviews with internal stakeholders, as well as all types of users listed above. From the interviews, we created user personas and distilled these personas to identify and prioritize goals and ideal workflows for each user type.
Site Map and Wireframes
Based on all of the data, we developed a comprehensive site map to organize all content at a high level. Each box represents a different page or series of pages on the site, and the site map shows how they fit together. Once the site map was finalized, we created 56 page-by-page wireframes, which lay out the content and features for each page in detail (based on our own design expertise as well as interaction design preferences articulated by the EPI staff during the discovery phase). The final deliverables (site map and wireframes) were handed off to design and development. The site was designed and developed by Six Pony Hitch, and is live at ecologyproject.org.
from the client We have a huge website with lots of facets (non-profit donation side, retail side, trip planning elements, and several extremely different audiences with different needs), and Tamara made it all come together seamlessly, which made the rest of the redesign process easier. I cannot recommend Tamara more highly.
Rachael Caldwell Communications Manager, Ecology Project International