The Pulitzer Center
The Who
The Pulitzer Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to journalism and education on global issues. Our team was tasked with updating their website as well as creating a microsite for one of their initiatives, the Rainforest Journalism Fund. Our stakeholders were concerned with the bounce rate with the live site and needed to expand their capabilities to include multiple languages for their international audience.
My Goals
Our goals were to modernize the appearance of their site, improve their content management system on the backend, improve the navigation by reducing nested pages, and enhance their storytelling capabilities by adding multi-language functionality for their global audience.
The Process
Discovery
During the Discovery Phase we conducted a site audit to review the current navigation and content structure of the website, stakeholder interviews to understand our client's pain points and needs, and a landscape analysis to review peer websites' organization.
Key Findings:
Pulitzer Center had a HUGE library of content and many pages were nested, leading to users getting frustrated and dropping from the site.
The website featured many journalists and educators, these profiles needed to share key contact and biographical information.
Story pages, where journalistic articles were showcased were often very long scrolling pages, lacking hierarchy and interactive elements to keep users engaged as they were reading.
Site Organization
Gathering our findings during Discovery, our team started with prioritizing the information architecture of the site. We scanned the site and interviewed different departments at pulitzer to pull out top level categories to section the site's massive content library by. We prioritized categories by our client needs and most visited site areas based on user analysis. Finally we mocked up new navigation menu options and refined them with our stakeholders.
Wireframing and Branding
Next we focused on updating the UI of the website. With our brand and development teams, I wireframed new page templates to create a consistent format for landing pages, articles, search, microsites, and profile pages. Our developers updated Pulitzer's CMS to Drupal 8 for easier content maintenance on the backend. I based my wireframe templates on Drupal 8's capabilities.
Throughout the website, we introduced new page components to optimize navigation, increase user engagement, and enhance Pulitzer’s storytelling capabilities. These components included:
Introducing tags based on content type, author, country, and project themes.
Utilizing an ‘inverted pyramid’ structure for content, where high-level overview information lived on landing pages and more detailed content lived on subpages.
Adding filtering and sorting features to the search experience
Once we confirmed our wireframe directions with our stakeholders, I worked with our UI designers to implement the updated branding to improve the look and accessibility of the pages.
