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Brave New Day
In an effort to more effectively and nimbly communicate with the public, Washington County’s Clean Water Services joined with the Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District and came to us for a digital repository of connections, tools, and organizations to invite a more active role in protecting watershed health.
As a dynamic, living resource, the Navigator needed to combine text, interactive maps, external links and references to homes, yards, neighborhoods, and the local environment. The structure needed to dynamically engage, rather than simply “tell” the audience information.
The central need was to provide a consistent, clear, and highly usable resource for residents to learn about, understand, and engage with the Tualatin Valley Watershed. It needed to allow residents to quickly and easily connect to relevant agencies and support systems to facilitate action or get answers to questions.
Our aim for the website was to craft an engaging experience that invites return visits, creating a passive opportunity for education and outreach, acting as a virtual “watershed concierge” of sorts, to reduce the public’s necessity to call for information.
This is not a ‘brochure’ in the end. As such, we focused on user needs and perspectives, rather than on a passive display of information. The experience/flow was parallel and interconnected, rather than linear.
We considered the navigational structure as a series of “choose your own adventure” operations from the outset of site interaction, not just in sections—operating as a “director” that guides an experience rather than an “menu” that shows a static list of options. The site’s structure then dynamically engages, instead of “telling” the audience where to go, or what to do.
The essential “landing” moment of the site situates the user in the exact watershed in question: the Tualatin River Valley, which is home to many key northwestern Oregon communities—such as Hillsboro, Beaverton, and Tigard. This helps focus the attention to the watershed itself, by providing an experience in which the users dive “into” the area itself to explore and learn.
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