Girl Scouts MidTN

2009 for Paramore|Redd (Client work)
Girl Scouts Homepage
Homepage Design Zoom
Girl Scouts Interior
Interior Design Zoom

Summary

The Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee wanted to refresh their online presence with something fun and playful that would attract kids and their parents to join the Scouts. They also needed a lot of help rethinking the site navigation and content find-ability.

At the time their current website’s main complaint from parents and scouts was that is was very difficult to find the information they needed and wanted to access, due to the navigation having up to 6 nested levels, and no real content strategy to speak of.

Proposal

From the first meeting I knew exactly what I wanted to accomplish with the redesign of the website. This was one of those projects that just flowed because I was in sync with what they wanted, and knew what I wanted to build them. Also as a former Boy Scout I had a duty to make sure the final product was 100% the best it could be.

For the design I wanted to do something that felt like a cartoon show, so I illustrated several woodland creatures, and made the background of the site a horizon with the ground near the bottom and clouds in the sky near the top. I even added a small worm in the dirt, if your monitor was big enough.

I kept the rest of the UI blocky and colorful to match the illustrated base of the project.

For the navigation I tried something completely different. Instead of repeating the full nav on every page, I reduced it down to only the navigation needed for that section of the website. This allowed us to create kind of a breadcrumb trail backwards and forwards, as if you were walking through a wooded trail with signs along the way. Overall this navigation change garnered the most praise from the client and their audience for making the site infinitely more browsable and discoverable. This change also allowed us to reduce the navigation nesting from six levels down to three.

I also built them a robust staff directory with search and sort-ability. A pdf storage section, with an Ajax search that let parents find important forms very quickly from any page on the website.

Practice

For this project, I practiced UX Design (research, wireframes, and user journeys), Illustration, UI Design, HTML/CSS/Javascript and ExpressionEngine CMS integration.

Photo of James Mathias

James Mathias is a father of four, husband of one. Internet improver, board gamer, fitness amateur, yoyo player, artist, writer + outlaw. → More

hire James 615 249 8113 Dribbble GitHub
Close [esc]
Close [esc]