National Trust website redesign
I project directed a collaborative team of UX, design, SEO, user research and content to reimagine the National Trust website, ready for it to be moved onto a new CMS. The project was driven by a refocus by the Trust of their goals as an organisation. The site was designed around some key goals to help users find what they are looking for as quickly and effectively as possible whilst also showcasing the depth and breadth of the National Trust offering.
We started with a content focused approach, modelling the content in line with an Object Oriented UX approach, building an IA that reflected the goals of the organisation and a fundamental remodelling of the search experience. By starting with search we knew that users would need to be able to quickly identify what type of content they were looking at, filter down the results and discover the unexpected. This resulted in a created a faceted search, ‘objects’ such as recipes, places, trails and events being modelled consistently and a design system that allowed a balance of consistency and flexiblity.
Due to the complexities of the content editorial model (involving hundreds of content editors across the country) we needed to create a system that could be maintained easily, and provided clear constraints and expectations for content editors, to provide users with a consistent high-quality experience.
Our team worked collaboratively with the National Trust team, in a sprint based approach, testing and iterating throughout the process, both with end users and internal users and stakeholders. The site is now live (however the search mechanism is yet to be implemented).