Brave New Day

Clean Water Services and the Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District came to us with a joint effort to create a digital “handbook” intended to increase awareness of watershed resources. Connecting residents with tools and organizations to invite a more active role in protecting watershed health, the “handbook” was to contain text, interactive maps and other multimedia content relevant to their personal home, yard, neighborhood, and the local environment.

As a dynamic, living resource, it quickly became clear that this needed to be more than just a “handbook,” with a focus on user needs and perspectives  rather than on a passive display of information. Approaching dual user categories of “Fact-Seekers” and “Explorers,” we crafted a resource that attended to both with equal importance.

To that end, we developed a set of “choose your own adventure” operations beyond just orienting the content into sections. In rethinking how the “menu” should work, we worked with the idea of being a “director” that guides an experience, rather than a traditional, top-down approach. We wanted the structure to dynamically engage, rather than simply “tell” the audience pertinent information.

Using focused and stylized Mapbox features, we we crafted an interactive map experience for the home/landing screen that brought users definitively into the Tualatin River Watershed, inviting exploration into the main menu categories.

By isolating content into “modules,” we allowed each to break free of traditional long scrolling website structures and create more dynamic associations between content groups. The primary navigational structure allowed the “Fact Seeker” audience to readily acces information in a traditional path, while the modular approach allowed particular focal points to be accessed in different ways, as certain items had more than one natural association.

The site is featured as part of Design Rush's Best Design Trends.

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