Our Work

Conservation International (CI) is a global organization that supports sustainable approaches to development in order to benefit people and all other life on Earth. The organization recently conducted a major redesign of its flagship site at conservation.org. Before starting the next phase of site improvements, CI engaged Forum One to validate earlier design decisions and inform future ones through extensive usability testing.

We identified potential audiences for testing, provided guidance on participant recruitment, and facilitated 10 testing sessions. The sessions, which evaluated the ease and effort with which users completed key tasks, uncovered some startling realizations. Although CI staff believed the new site was intuitive, many users had difficulty understanding the site's navigation and content management structure. Usability testing easily uncovered this unanticipated reality, which would have been hard to learn through any other method of investigation. CI staff was able to observe these findings with their own eyes and immediately deepen their understanding of their site's successes and failures. Forum One supplemented these discoveries with card sorts -- exercises that determine how well the site terms resonate with target users. To close the project, we discussed the findings and their design implications during a wrap-up session. We also trained CI staff on usability testing procedures so that they could conduct additional usability tests in-house.