BC Parks

Client

Ministry of Environment, Government of British Columbia

Industry

Environment

Climate

Role

Service Designer

UI/UX Designer

Team

Worked with one other Government Digital Experience (GDX) service designer and a contract UI/UX designer.

Context

I lead UI/UX & service design at the Government of BC, for a transformative overhaul of the provincial parks website to enable thousands of visitors to discover and explore parks in British Columbia.

Context & Challenge

To reflect the changing and diversifying nature of parks, protected areas, and their visitors in British Columbia, BC Parks needed to redevelop their online presence to provide the best, most up-to-date, useful and usable information about provincial parks for almost 70K visits to their website per day.

Design Strategies

Prioritizing accessibility and inclusivity goes beyond just park discovery. Recognizing efforts to acknowledge and respect Indigenous culture and traditional lands are integral to creating a meaningful and respectful digital experience for all users.

1. Task-based focus Information Hierarchy

Our research showed that most visitors use the site for trip planning. We prioritized this on the home page and created a new search bar with filters for activities.

2. Captivating and compelling alerts

The status of parks' safety for visitors need to be clear from general information. A strong banner and full alert section was made under the main search box along with eye-catching, colour-coded alerts.

3. plain language and highlighted iconography

To help visitors navigate long-pages and find accessibility information quicker, simple, straight-forward language was used, and basic park information was brought to the top along with a sticky navigation bar.

4. indigenous relations informations

It was integral to the project that we could share our research done with Indigenous communities, and include on the home page and park pages dedicated sections to BC Parks’ work in this area.

5. Showcasing beauty of bC parks

To highlight geographical features and wildlife, carousels were added throughout the site, giving space and recognition to the BC Parks visitors by sharing the photographs they take.

Conclusion

The comprehensive website redesign and research conducted for this project laid the cornerstone for its ongoing success, setting the standard and providing the blueprint for all subsequent phases. Our contributions have had a monumental impact, shaping the trajectory of the BC Parks website launch.

Results

accessibility for 20K+ site visitors & 50K site views per month

Test findings show that visitors say that even though park pages display a lot of information, the site is still very well-organized and is easier to navigate and find information than before.

Creating 3+ year Impact across BC parks

Our user research and redesign has catalyzed and contributed to the broader redesign of BC Parks’ digital products and services offerings across all channels. You can read about our detailed research process documented here on the provincial site↗.

Prioritizing work with indigenous communities

From our research and design recommendations to increase partnership with First Nations to update the information on the website to better reflect their deep connections to the land, BC Parks has continued to highlight this information on their website.