Finding a connection to Our national parks
National Park Foundation
Find Your Park is a website managed by the National Park Foundation (NPF), and it was originally created as part of a marketing campaign for the centennial celebration of the National Park Service. After the centennial, NPF wanted to redesign the website to make it a general resource for park visitors rather than focusing on the centennial campaign.
Roles
Discovery & Research
Information Architecture
Wireframes
User Testing
Discovery & Research
As a first step, I conducted a content inventory to review the content and analyze what was working and what was not. The original site used an interactive map that was supposed to allow users to locate parks across the United States. The map did not work well because it was hard for users to zoom, there weren't intuitive filters, and it didn't work on mobile devices. Our strategy moving forward was to create a browsable and searchable experience for audiences planning--and already on a park trip. In order to create this seamless experience across devices, we focused the main interaction on a search feature, as opposed to a map, that would allow users to browse for parks based on location and activities in the parks easily from all devices.
Information Architecture
While the structure of the site is very simple since there is not a lot of standard pages on the site, the taxonomy of activities and locations is what really brings the experience to life. Working with the client, we determined the best filtering options that would allow users to manipulate their results. Based on our internal guerrilla research, we decided location and activity would be the most useful. In addition to a robust search that allows users to filter parks, we provided curated articles that pulled in specific parks that gave users an additional way to look for parks.
Wireframes & User Testing
There was a lot of debate on how the filters should work on the site, so I created paper sketches and walked them around the office to get feedback from people on how they expected the filters to work. The result was to include numbers next to each filter that indicated to the user how many parks either resided in a particular state or how many parks contained the option to participate in a specific activity.
Results
The new Find Your Park website launched on time with a fully functioning search tool. The client was extremely happy and the website was used to generate engagement and park visits.