Nature’s Classroom

Creating a new experience for national parks education.

Project Overview

  • Role

    Led interaction and visual design. Collaborated on user research & content strategy.

  • Problem

    The National Park Service’s (NPS) mission is to inspire a deep appreciation for park history. However, the current website's complex navigation and scattered educational resources create a significant barrier, hindering a key user segment’s (educators’) ability to efficiently discover and utilize valuable content.

  • Goal

    To streamline the educators user flow of discovering content. To enable educators to make decisions about NPS lesson plans & curriculum on mobile and desktop. 


  • Team

    Brittany Jain, Liz Delaney

  • Skills

    Responsive design, Content design

  • Timeline

    6-weeks

User Research

Proto-Persona

Meet, Amelia. A dedicated teacher who needs an easy way to find lesson plans because she is passionate about the environment and determined to teach her students about our National Parks.

User Journey

The Scenario: Amelia is interested finding resources that highlight the importance of national parks and conservation efforts. She goes to the National Parks website to find educational resources, ends up searching for a Lewis & Clark lesson plan and nearby hiking trail information.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis revealed that while industry peers offer multimodal content, effective navigation and search remain elusive, hindering the experience of users. Users universally struggled with search functionality, navigation clarity, and content organization.

To address these challenges and boost user efficiency, I redesigned the website to streamline the lesson plan discovery and selection process. I included features like location-based search, a lesson plan comparison tool, and revamped navigation pathways in order to create a more seamless user experience.

Pain Points

Our usability testing with six users revealed that NPS, like it’s competitors, struggled to provide accurate search results, clear navigation & seamless content organization.

Problem Statement

How might we create a highly organized content structure with a robust search function and intuitive navigation to enhance educator’s user experience?

Strategy

Desktop Wireframes

After designing the mobile wireframes, I began to think about how they would scale across platforms to desktop. 

Sitemap

Card sorting informed a new sitemap that reimagined content organization. Recognizing that heavy reliance on search often indicates poor navigation, we prioritized a clear content structure and encouraged exploration and serendipitous discovery.

Mobile Wireframes

With this design, Amelia can easily navigate to & find the content she is looking for. By adding reviews & a compare feature, my goal was to reduce decision making fatigue. By simplifying the user experience, Amelia may be more likely to return the NPS to find educational content about parks.

Clearly communicates navigational entry points of the educators microsite

A closer look

Redesigned search with updated filters 

Outlines process for educators to get published by sharing their lesson plans

Key content above the fold

Reviews to aid classroom content selection

Ability to compare lesson plans to alleviate decision making fatigue

Content organization and grouping to make it easier for users to scan content and expand when needing more details

Prototype & Test

Usability Test Results

I conducted a three usability tests of my desktop low-fidelity prototypes, in addition to three five-second homepage tests. With feedback, I iterated on my designs.

Final Designs

The desktop prototype

The mobile experience

Retrospect

Impact

“I found the redesigned national park service website to be easy to use, simple to navigate and well-organized. I like that I can see other teacher’s reviews and imagine that comparing lesson plans might be very helpful.” - User Tester #3

Lessons Learned

I learned how to design for various screen sizes. By taking a design systems approach I was able to create a consistent experience.

Next Steps

I would like to develop a user flow for educator publishing and conduct further research on the compare feature.