National Garden Scheme

The National Garden Scheme is an incredible organisation, giving people unique access to some of Britain’s most memorable gardens and donating the proceeds to charities. The object of the re-design was to connect more people with more gardens, and increase donations. Key to making this a reality was to build a streamline and intuitive garden search functionality that catered for a range of users. User research revealed that a large portion of users didn’t get the connection with charity, so the new re-design needed to make that relationship clear.

I developed personas and scenarios to better understand the key users. This brought a wide range of demographics, goals and needs to understand and cater for.

I used task models to better understand what the different personas search requirements, and applied these findings to the search system.

Demonstrating how the users could use the website with user journeys helped me to identify user behaviour and revealed some interesting ways to keep the user engaged while helping them achieve their goal, such as introducing and add to calendar and add to favourites function, and making it clear throughout the journey how their visit and donations help charities.

Next up I wireframed the site using axure, with 3 responsive main responsive breakpoints. I held regular meetings with the stakeholders to review pages, walking through the user journeys on an interactive prototype making iterations where needed.

With wireframe sign off, I then designed a few key pages, along with a style guide which could then be taken by the dev team and applied to all the wireframes pages.

A few highlights from the process

- Confirming attendance / add to calendar / add to favourites functionality

- Ensuring no dead ends in the search system

- Offering location based search alongside chronological listings

- Identifying key sharing points and making it easy to involve third parties