Columbia center on global energy policy
We completed a full revamp of the website for Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP), a resource hub and complex article repository used by government bodies across the globe for the transition to renewable energy. The end result significantly improved the user experience and aligned with the organization’s overarching goals.
ROLE
Information Architecture & Content Strategy Lead
Project Overview
The Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs develops evidence-based research to help address the world’s most challenging energy and climate problems through research, education, and dialogue. CGEP needed a digital platform to showcase their expertise, represent their spirit of innovation, and adequately meet the needs of energy professionals, policy leaders and academics visiting the site to access CGEP’s resources. The resulting website highlighted programs, initiatives and thought leadership, while improving the user experience.
Research & Discovery
A foundation of thorough research conducted during the discovery phase supported the overall website redesign. To establish a clear understanding of the audience, I led a series of user interviews to identify motivations and pain points among policymakers and other government professionals, who are the website’s primary visitors. I developed discussion guides and interviewed members of the Biden Administration to uncover frustrations and gather input on use cases, which informed the website’s information architecture, content hierarchy and user experience. We also analyzed website analytics, conducted stakeholder interviews, and evaluated competition to glean insights that would ultimately help us balance user needs with business goals.
Key findings
Several key insights emerged from the interviews that would inform the site structure and user experience:
Users have diverse needs when searching for energy and climate resources, depending on their job function and area of expertise
Users often depend on output from trusted experts with whom they have existing familiarity, and look to them when seeking out the latest information
Energy professionals tend to look for quick takes to include in presentations and memos, and reserve long-form content for down time and/or outside of working hours
Stakeholders prioritize positioning CGEP as a leader in the global transition away from fossil fuels, and as a prolific and academically rigorous institution
Information Architecture
Once insights had been generated, I played a key role in determining how the content would be organized on the site and ultimately how users would accomplish their goals and find the information they were looking for.
Sitemap
Using a combination of discovery insights and UX best practices, I created a sitemap to define the overall website structure. The process proved challenging, as the website had a massive amount of content and a variety of user and business interests to appeal to. We streamlined content categories across the primary and secondary navigation, and relocated primary navigation items that did not quite cohere with the established taxonomy into secondary navigation categories.
Content Wireframes
UX content strategy was communicated using content wireframes for each page or page category (e.g. blog posts, journal publications, etc.). The wireframes conveyed the information hierarchy, as well as the purpose and desired takeaways of each page.
Research Repository Experience
In accordance with user interview findings we created the research repository experience to support different search preferences (e.g. some users may want to search content by region, while others by topic, etc.) and by creating an overall more seamless user experience.
We reformatted publications to be more digestible, and for longer publications added executive summaries for the many readers who need a quick overview rather than a deep dive. A sticky table of contents was also created for easy navigation of long-form reports.
Impact
Overall the website redesign significantly improved the user experience, and received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the client, stakeholders and end users. It emphasized CGEP’s mission, values, and initiatives, and met the center’s goal to represent itself as a pillar of innovative thought leadership while maintaining an air of tradition.
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