The client
The Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) is a non-profit dedicated to conserving Australian wildlife and habitats through land management and partnerships with First Nations groups, governments, and private landowners.
Overview
Icon Agency was tasked with redesigning and building AWC’s website. In my dual role as both UX/UI designer and project manager, I led the design efforts while managing timelines, client communication, budgets, and internal teams. I collaborated with a content strategist, developers, and AWC stakeholders to ensure the website aligned with AWC’s objectives of raising brand awareness and driving engagement.
The new website needed to provide an intuitive, informative experience for local and international audiences while showcasing AWC’s conservation efforts. Our goal was to build trust, drive long-term engagement, and inspire action, whether through donations, volunteering, or partnerships.
Challenge
During the discovery phase, we conducted various research activities, including stakeholder and content workshops, a desktop review, competitor analysis, a content audit, persona development, and mapping current (and eventually future-state) user journeys. These efforts helped identify existing business challenges, prioritise target audiences, determine key user tasks and needs, and understand the channels, campaigns, and integrations that would influence the site.
The discovery phase revealed several challenges:
- Ineffective management of multiple regional sites leading to a confusing donation process
- Lack of clarity in communicating AWC’s conservation impact
- Limited filtering and search functionality
- Accessibility issues, inconsistent formatting, and poor content structure
Solution
We recognised that AWC’s website needed to focus on impact-driven, concise, and engaging content to inspire user action. This required a multifaceted approach that included:
- Storytelling: Featuring real-world conservation efforts through stories from field workers to bring AWC’s mission to life.
- Showcasing success: Highlighting key wins and achievements to demonstrate the impact of AWC’s work, including partnership case studies.
- Donor-centric language: Using language that fostered a stronger connection with supporters and encouraged action.
- Improved search: Enhancing search functionality for a smoother user experience.
- Improved information architecture: Restructuring content to make it easier for users to navigate and find key information.
- Related content: Adding more related content modules and improving content tagging to encourage deeper exploration.
- Skimmable summaries: Providing short, scannable content summaries for users seeking quick information.
- Reduced clicks: Simplifying navigation to reduce the number of clicks needed to access key information.
- Beautiful interface: Designing modern, visually appealing templates that allow visuals to shine and ensure accessibility needs are met.
By focusing on these areas, we aimed to make the website more intuitive and engaging, helping users connect with AWC’s mission and easily take action to support its conservation work.
Approach
Information architecture
After gathering insights during the discovery phase, we moved on to redesigning the site's information architecture. This collaborative effort involved myself, a content strategist, and AWC subject-matter experts. Key changes included narrowing the “Our Work” section to focus on field programs like “Fire Management” and “Feral Animal Control,” and elevating “Our Locations” (renamed “Our Sanctuaries”) and “Wildlife We Protect” (renamed “Explore Wildlife”) to the top level, as these were the most popular content. We also moved the “Work With Us” section under “About Us” and consolidated all news and media into a “News and Resources” section.
A tree test with 72 participants showed positive results (71% success, 73% directness), leading to further refinements, such as renaming “Our Work” to “What We Do,” “Our Sanctuaries” to “Explore Places,” and “Work With Us” to “Careers.”
Wireframes and prototype testing
Before wireframing, we identified key templates and components to ensure flexibility and reduce hardcoding, including pages for news, content (with variations for Species Profiles, Sanctuaries, and Programs), listing, navigation, campaign/donation, and search results. Interface improvements focused on a more accessible mega menu, consistent content treatment, related content modules, a multi-step donation form, and quicker access to content using components such as anchor links and side drawers.
1:1 usability tests with five participants revealed key insights, such as a preference for exploring sanctuaries by state, difficulty identifying visitable sanctuaries, and a desire for fewer sections per page. Participants also emphasised showcasing AWC’s partnership with First Nations peoples and clearer distinctions between donation options, like one-off donations versus donating on behalf of a friend.
High fidelity designs
Bringing the website to life with the AWC brand presented some challenges, as their style guide was limited to colours, fonts, the logo, and basic editorial collateral. However, they had an impressive library of breathtaking landscape and wildlife imagery. The website needed to not only showcase wildlife but also highlight the work of staff in the field, diverse communities, and First Nations peoples. To achieve this, I made the imagery the focal point, opting for a clean, minimal layout that allowed the visuals to tell their story.
Vibrant, accessible colours were used to evoke hope and positivity, alongside subtle interactions for added delight. The design, paired with a clear information architecture, location-specific content, and seamless system integrations, aims to empower users to easily connect with and support AWC’s mission.
This site is currently under development and is set to be launched in March next year.