Volunteered at the Environment Monitoring and Action Initiating Trust (EMAI), Chennai as a UX Design consultant.

Delivered interactive wireframes made with Figma for their desktop and mobile website.

Challenges

The current website for the Trust does not reflect the vast amount of work done by them since 2005.

It was vital to understand why things were what they were. These could be the constraints or challenges to consider before proposing a re-design.

• Content Audit revealed that -

  • Images / Photos of all activities conducted by EMAI are archived in personal storage devices of the founder/co-ordinator.

  • There is no digital directory or repository where one can access their history.

• Volunteers were mainly engineering students - a floating population with fluctuating count and availabilities.

• Current website was developed by students using Wordpress and with whatever content they could create or had access to.

• Presence on social media was also limited.

• Not enough efforts towards procuring external funding.

Goals

Based on interviews with the founder of the Trust and it’s co-ordinator, following goals were inferred.

• Short-term goals - increase volunteer base, procure CSR fundings

• Long term goals - increase chapters/events and paid memberships

• Website re-design - key to achieving above goals by serving as a transparent and up-to-date repository of all activities by the Trust and thereby enhance their credibility and popularity

Sitemap

Based on a study of the websites of many organisations worldwide working in the field of environment and wildlife, it was proposed that the Trust have a concise way of communicating their work via impact areas and collaborators. Below sitemap was proposed after several discussions to ensure that regular content updation for site was feasible for the volunteers. Different Calls to Action were also identified.

Prototyping with Figma

A custom designed site was proposed to be developed by another volunteer. Although solutions built with Wix, Squarespace etc could also be explored, a custom design gave full freedom to tweak requirements on the fly. Without actual text content or other assets, it took more effort in wire-framing for the desktop as well as mobile version of the website. Interactive prototypes can also be found here for desktop website and here for mobile website.