text: Quinn Keast | Native Plant Solutions
  Building a goal-driven web presence for Native Plant Solutions
  Late 2014 – 2015
  Native Plant Solutions draws on over 75 years of knowledge and experience to create natural and sustainable landscapes. As Ducks Unlimited Canada's for-profit arm, the consultancy provides environmental services based on natural processes and sound science, with an exceptional return on investment.
  In late 2014, Native Plant Solutions recognized the need to break new ground on the web and establish a digital presence that would serve as a crucial tool for engaging and establishing client relationships.
  Naturalized wetlands create watefowl habitat and provide water retention for urban environments. | © DUC
  At the start of the project, I identified three specific challenges to get us started:
  How can we clarify Native Plant Solution's business needs?
  How can we develop a strong understanding of Native Plant Solution's digital audience and their needs?
  How can we establish a clear strategy and long-term goals?
  Rapid research & discovery
  To better understand Native Plant Solution's goals and how to best engage their audience, I engaged internal stakeholders in a series of discovery meetings.
  We quickly uncovered the overriding business goal: engage our users, build their confidence in Native Plant Solution's ability to meet their needs, and get them to pick up the phone and make the first call.
  To help us better understand how to reach this goal, I held a user persona workshop to clarify and prioritize Native Plant Solution's audience. As a team, we identified five critical, unique audience groups, each with their own distinct needs, concerns, and context.
  With a clear understanding of what Native Plant Solution's web presence needed to achieve, I visualized the customer journey that would drive the information architecture, content, and design: from exploration and search, to decision-making and action, and ultimately maintaining a long-term relationship with clients.
  I explored a number of design directions before landing on an approach that would highlight the natural spaces that Native Plant Solutions creates, while making their process transparent and accessible. Content was developed hand-in-hand with early prototyping and iteration, allowing copy and structure to evolve together.
  With a design direction established, I created a set of building blocks for content elements that would help users follow and visualize Native Plant Solution's work.
  Because each project is unique and dominated by stunning visual imagery, I created functionality that would detect and apply a subtle background colour to each page based on the dominant colour in each project's main imagery. As well, I created a subtle fade-and-parallax animation on page scroll that adds additional visual depth.
  The website we launched in early 2015 is not only easy for the Native Plant Solutions team to update with stunning new case studies, it's driving a high level of user engagement, with strong performance along each of the crucial user paths.