Redesign and content organization enhancing the experience of Golden Gate National Park visitors
One of the main goals of The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy's website redesign was to improve the park visit experience.
Their site had a wealth of information about programs, events, trails, and places of interest, but it was difficult for site visitors to get a good sense of where those items were in space.
An interactive map was a clear solution to this challenge, and became one of the key organizing frameworks for the site.
Interviews with park visitors revealed trail difficulty and time commitment as two key criteria that hikers used to evaluate which path to take. Plotting the elevation and distance information as a sparkline gave hikers a capsule picture of what to expect on the hike.
We embedded a map in all content with location information. This enabled both the functional capability of visiting the item (trail/event/program/etc.) in question and provided an alternate means of browsing The Conservancy's content (i.e. an answer to the question "What else is around here?")