Sustainability | My porfolio

Sustainability Tracker Website Redesign

Objective

The Sustainable Tracker is a website focused on tracking and sharing stories around progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Though the current sustainable tracker website is functional, it fails to include features that would capture an audience due to its outdated design and incompatible tech stack. The goal of our project is to redesign and implement the website to have a more visually appealing and consistent structure that makes adding new features easy. The structure of our website will support tracking of SDG progress, display relevant stories, motivate partnerships between SDG initiatives, help people find ways that they can make an impact, and serve as a great educational resource.

Mission

To bring local and global communities together to collaborate on achieving SDG’s and being an all in one site for sustainability.

Position

Designer

Timeline

September 2022 -

December 2022

Tools Used

Figma, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power Point, Discord, WordPress

Team

Sabrina Sullivan, Steven Molotnikov, Carolyn Zhang, Karl Hernandez, Kimberly Wong, Robert Ramirez

Overview

Background

There are too many sustainability websites on the internet. To find sustainable news, one might visit the New York Times’ sustainability section. To find sustainability events, one might use the popular app Meetup. To find sustainability data, one might start with the UN’s SDG website and branch off into dozens of SDG tracking websites (1 2 3 4 5). To find sustainable advocacy work, one might flip through hundreds of websites of local organizations. In order to find what efforts companies in the area might be taking, one would also need to visit their individual websites. As sustainability becomes more mainstream and more people become interested in the problem, the movement has become more and more decentralized.

According to Jamie, a third-year student at UCSD majoring in Psychology, the sustainable tracker website is hard to understand with skimming and she also mentioned the fact that people usually do not read websites thoroughly, so she said it would be better to add some visual factors which can sum up the content of the website. Our team also interviewed some students at Geisel at UCSD, 3 students couldn’t find the SDG dashboard on the current website. They also mentioned that it is hard to point out the exact purpose of the website since the existing website merged all sources without proper organization.

Past projects related to this have focused on designing a better sustainability tracking mechanism for the UN SDGs. However, similar more developed projects already exist on other websites. In addition, the UI design of the sustainability tracker website is relatively unappealing, which might make it difficult to attract new users. The content on the sustainability tracker website is also not up-to-date. This hurts the Sustainable Tracker’s reliability not only because sustainability is a fast-moving field, many projects related to SDG goals have been delayed and canceled due to COVID.

We aim to address this problem by redesigning the Sustainable Tracker website and making it into a “Sustainability Platform,” a place where people can go to find the most up-to-date and reliable sustainability information. We intend to create a space that attracts sustainability enthusiasts who want to quickly find stories, data, and events and also promote independently sustainable companies. With our team’s design and development skills, we believe we can create a better website for the Sustainable Tracker that more closely aligns with its purpose.

My Role

UI Designer - Designed user interface
UX researcher - Conducted user research to maximize the user experience of the website
Writer - Wrote the research paper as a team member

Approach

Design Challenge & User Research Methods

Our approach to the design challenge began with reviewing work from past teams and meeting with Janice, the owner of the website and our primary stakeholder. Janice has a lot of ideas for what the website can become in the future, so each team in the past seemed to have their own focus.

While looking through the website and reading the previous teams reports, we found that there were inconsistencies throughout the website. In order to create a platform that future teams can build on top of, we decided that we needed to first create a solid foundation. For the planning aspect of the project, we will review past Figma work for guidance and create detailed Figma wireframes. We will then discuss a new technology stack that is more flexible than Wordpress, and begin implementation.

We will begin our process with user research. We will use primary as well as secondary research in order to quickly identify user needs. We will interview and collaborate with Janice and complete user testing of website prototypes with her. During user research and team meetings, one person will be a dedicated note-taker while others ask questions. During user testing we will have a set list of interview questions and tasks for the user to complete in order to assure that the architecture is user friendly. One person will conduct the interview while another takes notes.