LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) are on a mission to inspire and enable sustainable farming that is prosperous, enriches the environment and engages local communities.
One of the many ways they achieve this is through educating and supporting farmers, business and the wider public on the benefits and challenges of sustainable farming.
Through Whiteroom, I worked directly with the LEAF marketing and operations team to redesign the LEAF online experience, working across their consumer facing website and members area, helping to rationalise the wealth of information LEAF provides into a user experience that was concise, easy to understand and relevant to their distinct audience demographics.
The main challenge with redesigning the LEAF site was in bringing order and hierarchy to their existing content which had become cluttered and unusable due to technical debt acquired through an outdated content management system.
To solve this problem I worked with the LEAF team to clearly define and understand the three target groups their content would be most beneficial to. Producers, suppliers and the consumer. This allowed us to reorganise their content and the information architecture of the new site around the end user, helping to keep content current and relevant.
In doing this it also provided a way to coherently organise and manage their content going forward by proposing a new back end system based on the Craft content management platform, making their content modular and reusable throughout the new site - ultimately reducing the time and effort required to keep the site up to date.
The main aim with the LEAF website redesign was to make the wealth of information they have available easily accessible to the public, consumer and farmer without compromising on creating a modern look and feel.
To do this I took a modular approach to the new user interface, working from the atomic level up to create a design language that would be flexible enough to work across a wide range of content types while still remaining consistent across the site and when used within the different silos of content for each audience.
The new site made heavy use of interactive and engaging page elements such as modals, galleries and other interactive components.
This was a deliberate choice to allow LEAF to condense large volumes of content down into easily navigable and eye-catching sections that invite them to explore further as they explore the site.
The new interface combined with a new information architecture that focuses on providing the most relevant audience to the right audience group works to create a much more considered, easily managed and easy to use website experience for LEAF.
This ultimately lead to a rise in site traffic and engagement with the site and the wider LEAF organisation to help share their knowledge and engage with the public to educate them on the benefits of a sustainable economy.
