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
My 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 carried out a range of research activities—including stakeholder and content workshops, competitor and desktop analysis, a content audit, persona development, and mapping current and future-state user journeys. These efforts helped surface key business challenges, prioritise target audiences, define core user needs, and understand the broader ecosystem of channels, campaigns, and system integrations that would shape the website experience.
We uncovered several critical issues impacting both usability and engagement. The management of multiple regional sites had created a fragmented user journey, particularly around donations, leading to confusion and drop-off. AWC’s conservation impact wasn’t being clearly communicated, making it harder to build trust and inspire support. Limited filtering and search functionality restricted users’ ability to find relevant content, while accessibility barriers, inconsistent formatting, and poor content structure further undermined the user experience.
Solution
To improve the user experience of AWC’s website, we focused on creating a more intuitive, inspiring, and action-oriented website. We prioritised clarity and engagement by streamlining content into digestible summaries, simplifying navigation, and reducing friction across key journeys like donations and exploration of AWC’s work. Through storytelling, clear calls to action, and donor-centric language, we aimed to foster an emotional connection while meeting users’ informational needs. Enhancements to search, tagging, and related content modules further encouraged deeper engagement.
Redesigning the information architecture was central to improving usability. Using insights from the discovery phase and in collaboration with AWC’s subject-matter experts, we restructured the site to better reflect user priorities. We elevated high-interest sections like “Explore Wildlife” and “Our Sanctuaries” to top-level navigation, consolidated scattered resources into a single “News and Resources” hub, and relocated less-used content. A tree test with 72 participants validated these changes (with 71% task success), guiding refinements like clearer section naming and better content grouping.
We then prototyped and tested key templates with real users to ensure flexibility, consistency, and clarity. Usability testing revealed a preference for exploring sanctuaries by location, a need for clearer donation flows, and greater visibility of AWC’s work with First Nations communities. These insights shaped the final design, which balanced strong visual storytelling with clean, accessible layouts and modular components. The result is a more user-friendly experience that supports both exploration and action—helping users connect with and support AWC’s mission.
