The Problem

Casey Trees is an urban forestry nonprofit with the mission to restore and protect the tree canopy of Washington, D.C. When I first joined Casey Trees, their website served its purpose as a basic tool for people to learn about the organization. However, a seriously outdated design, unintuitive navigation, desktop focus, and lacking functionality hindered the site’s ability to market its services to individuals, community partners, donors, and others. My job as the project manager was to bring it into the modern age and ultimately increase pageviews and conversions through user testing.

Research

Types: Web Analytics, Personas, User Interviews, User Testing

To kick off the project I spent a few days looking into web analytics to find the most useful pages of the site and establish a baseline for session quality and user behavior.

As a second step, I conducted interviews with Casey Trees staff and a small group of tree planting volunteers to gain an understanding of the organization’s online goals, its target audiences and rankings of them, and its primary conversion points.

Afterward, I did several rounds of user testing of the primary and secondary online goals to identify changes required to improve the user experience.

Challenge

Casey Trees has a fairly broad mission that brings together people with a wide range of expertise in urban forestry. From someone who has never noticed the difference between an oak and a pine, to certified arborists — Casey Trees wants to bring them into the fold as a volunteer, member or community partner. Designing a navigation that made sense for the majority of use cases led to fruitful internal debates and ultimately we relied heavily on our analytics research to move the project forward.

Concepts

Based on our research and findings, we created several wireframes aimed at gaining basic layout feedback. After wireframe approval, we put together full homepage designs and subsequently interior designs going through four rounds of significant revisions.

Outcome

The website redesign was well received within Casey Trees and led to 185% increase in email signups, 57% increase in traffic to key pages and 47% increase in session duration. Replatforming and updating the website created better integrations with their other systems and considerably cut down on the amount of time needed to create new content. Monthly user testing keeps the site current and aids in the discovery of navigational and copy issues.