The Wilderness Project
WEBSITE UI DESIGN
Designing an impactful, informative and user-friendly website for The Wilderness Project, a charity who’s mission is to protect Africa’s river systems.
The Wilderness Project are an environmental charity working towards studying, exploring and protecting over 1 million square kilometres of remote wilderness in Africa’s greatest river basins by 2035.
Supporting as a designer for ethical agency Kind, my role was as UI designer for this project, which I picked up after the new brand identity was created by Kind who then also went on to do a website discovery and research phase to discover the user needs, allowing me to use this information to create wireframes and UI designs.
The website, in line with the new brand, needed a refresh. It no longer represented the brand and was quite restrictive with what it allowed them to do. The new website needed to show their ambitions and what they’re working towards, to clearly communicate the new brand and to allow them to combine science and storytelling to create a functional yet beautiful website. They needed to be able to present various information in different formats, and to do this in a clear and user friendly way.
The main aim of this project was to create a user-friendly, accessible website that could present a wide range of information in an elegant way, whilst also giving The Wilderness Project credibility.
My role in this project supporting agency Kind, was being responsible for the UI design process, from wireframes through to responsive UI design and development handover.
We started with wireframes to get clarity on the main user journeys and page structures, then I moved into creating a creative direction for web with a moodboard to clarify the direction we’d be going in, before moving through to building out the design system, creating components and designing core pages in Figma, keeping it on brand and regularly collaborating with the client through an iterative process. I created the rest of the responsive page templates and then used the flexible component based templates to design examples using real client content. This was to give the client full flexibility and variety over their website whilst staying consistent and on brand. It also gave them complete freedom over keeping their content engaging, telling stories in an impactful way and also communicating clear information.
The final result was an impactful, accessible and elegant website presenting a wide range of information about the work that The Wilderness Project are doing (such as reports, imagery, videos and expedition updates) in an engaging and user-friendly way. The website clearly shows they are a credible charity, doing important work and allows them to continue the impactful work of protecting Africa’s wilderness.
Let’s work together
If you're looking for a designer who brings creativity, strategy and understanding to the process, someone who really listens and works with you.. I’d love to support you! Whether you’re starting from scratch or ready to refresh what you’ve got, let’s collaborate on a website that helps move your business forward.