Environmental Justice Green Book

Overview

In 2007, GreenLaw and the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University published Putting the Law to Work in Our Communities: A Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Protection and Justice in Georgia. This comprehensive handbook aimed to explain major environmental laws and legal tools to regular citizens. While the handbook was informative, it was also complex and overwhelming to navigate.

Starting Point

To create a digital directory of the handbook, I set the following objectives:

• Create a user persona to understand the target audiences needs and context of use.
• Design a logical user flow that breaks down the information into easy-to-digest steps.
• Simplify the organization of complex environmental law information.
• Create a user-friendly filtering system to help users find the information they need.
• Offer relevant resources based on the user’s previous answers.

Discovery & Research

To implement the right solution, I first wanted to understand how users look for this type of information. I took the following steps in order to do this:

• I analyzed the existing handbook to determine overarching themes and category buckets.
• I conducted a benchmark of competitor websites to discover trends and opportunities.
• I created user personas to understand the target audiences needs and context of use.
• I focused on potential filtering systems to break down this information.

The Results

Based on my discovery process, I created wireframes for a solution that:

• Breaks down the different search steps into simple questions to make them easier to digest for users.
• Progressively discloses new information to not overwhelm the user.
• Considers previous answers to dictate and contextualize the next steps.
• Offers resources based on the collected information.

The resulting digital directory shifts the need to understand the logic of the filters away from the user. It does this by presenting a series of 4 questions that help the directory narrow down what the user is looking for, and then presenting the results to them in context of their answers. The UI team took my wireframes and applied key design elements that expanded on the concept (see below).

Conclusion

In this new directory, users are now easily able to navigate the site and find what they’re looking for without feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of the information. The logical user flow and filtering system also makes it easy to narrow down their search and find the resources most relevant to them.