Protected Planet
Creative Direction. Research. Design.

Protected Planet is part of the United Nations Environment Programme, It’s the largest database on terrestrial and marine protected areas.

They contacted Modern Human, the agency whose I was working with, to ask for help in understanding how to structure all the information gathered from different protected areas in the world. They also had a big amount of research and reports related to the work that the UN is doing on Protected Areas and Protected species that was hard to access because it was not organised and sometimes not even digitalised. It was clear that the main challenge was how to make all these information accessible and meaningful to Academics and Researchers, Protected Areas Managers and the General Public.

We met the Protected Planet UX Design Team for a first chat, It emerged they also wanted to collaborate with an external agency to have fresh eyes on some of the work that they were doing in house.

We started the discovery phase immediately with a Kick off meeting, we worked together with the Protected Planet UX Design Team to understand their vision, pain points and concerns.

Together with them, we wrote a Cover Story and we worked on few Empathy Maps, this gave us already a good understanding of their vision and what they thought their users were.

Meanwhile we organised an online survey to gather more quantitative data on the user’s pain points while using protecteplanet.net, I was also responsible for interviewing several stake holders and users to gather more specific and qualitative data. I then merged the different data in a User Research Meta Analysis, which identified different users groups and personas.

The concepting phase focused on the online public side of Protected Planet, identifying three main different user’s groups: The Academic Researcher, The Protected Area Manager and the Business Ecologist.

We workshopped some ideas with the Protected Planet UX Design Team and we started the Design phase, keeping the first designs on paper to help the Protected Planet UX Design Team to see the design challenges on an abstract level and to maintain fresh eyes.

We shared our first designs with a paper prototype and we then started to create the entire set of wireframes for protectedplanet.net, the public facing database which contains all Protected Areas information and details.

The Protected Planet UX Design Team started to implement the new designs online and after few weeks we run a user validation testing to see if the designs were working and to gather user’s feedback.

This project gave me the opportunity to be responsible for the entire design cycle, from identifying the brief with the client to planning, research, design and creative direction of the final execution.