Context & The Problem
Our client was looking to redesign their existing website for the national urban park in Saskatoon. The project was conveyed to us as a contentious public project and our client’s goal was to provide information to the public while conveying a friendlier but trustworthy atmosphere. They noted that the park is a beloved part of the community and so there was much concern over the future development of the park.
The existing website felt too corporate and generic. The client really wanted to convey to their target audience that the future plans for the park is being well considered and would be done with great care.
Design and Mock up
Due to budget and timeline limitations, we had to accelerate the process by eliminating some design processes. The design team and project manager came together to discuss and review meeting notes from the client kick-off meeting to better understand what the approach to the design would be. Out of our discussion we decided that we needed to incorporate more colours and illustrations to help establish and build a friendlier tone for the website. Utilizing a combination of some stock illustrations and creating my own illustrations, I put together different sceneries and activities that represented the different topics and benefits the project would bring.
My approach to help further soften the website’s atmosphere was to utilize rounded UI elements and organic shapes in the background.
Learning Outcomes
While budget and timeline concerns impacted our design and development processes, I think one of the biggest challenges we faced was the content writing. Copy was still in development when the project began, so designing in tandem while content was still being written was a challenge. Changes in the content ultimately impacted some of the layouts I had designed and I needed to work closely with my web developer to determine the most effective UI solution without compromising the UX as much as we could for the website. We discussed some of the structural limitations in different design. Most notably the partners and perspectives page layout which went through several iterations of design to build an alphabetical list to improve the UX and organize the large list of stakeholders and partners of the project.