UX Case Study
Henry's Fork Wildlife Alliance - a grassroots conservation nonprofit in Island Park, Idaho.
Henry's Fork Wildlife Alliance is a small, all-volunteer nonprofit focused on wildlife conservation in rural Idaho: habitat protection, a bear conflict response program, and community education. Their website had existed for years but had grown into a fragmented experience. The four-person team (board president, two wildlife biologists, and a communications coordinator) knew the site wasn't working but needed help defining a path forward.
During the redesign, they were also launching a brand-new community bear sighting and conflict reporting tool. This would be HFWA's first interactive digital product and needed to launch with the new site.
I handled the project end-to-end as a volunteer: research, information architecture, design system, interaction design, and development.
Before designing anything, I interviewed all four stakeholders and ran a full content audit of the existing website. I mapped where content lived against where visitors would actually expect to find it.
Alerts, testimonials, events, video embeds, news cards, donation CTAs, and program links were stacked with no hierarchy. The team described it as having too many competing banners and no clear main message. The page attempted to serve every audience and purpose at once, creating no focal point, no narrative, and no obvious next action.
HFWA regularly publishes urgent updates (public comment deadlines, zoning meetings, bear warnings), but the only mechanism was manual homepage content dumps. This is an infrastructure issue: without a designated urgency pattern, the homepage accumulates one-off alerts and collapses over time.
"About Us" and "Our Work" overlapped heavily, mission language was duplicated, updates were split across separate news/blog taxonomies, and events/volunteer opportunities were buried in sidebars. The donate action was implemented as a dropdown menu, adding decision friction at the core conversion point.
The bear sighting/conflict reporting program was not a simple contact form. Data quality directly impacts response speed and can influence whether lethal removal is avoided. The tool needed to work for stressed users on phones in rural areas, often without formal addresses.
The most consequential decision was structural, not visual. The redesign applied a strict rule: each page has exactly one job. If content didn't support that job, it moved.
The critical split was clarifying "About" versus "Our Work." About became organization identity (who/why), and Our Work became organizational output (what/how/results). Once this distinction was explicit, content sorted naturally and navigation ambiguity dropped.
I also replaced the old donate dropdown with a direct action button to remove choice friction at the highest-value conversion moment.
The homepage clutter issue required a system, not visual cleanup. I designed a conditional alert card in the hero region:
This avoids the common failures of permanent empty alert zones (banner blindness), intrusive modals, or crowded top bars. In CMS terms, this is implemented as a simple visibility toggle plus message field, but the UX value is consistency and long-term sustainability.
Typical users are community members who may be on a rural road/trail, on mobile, uncertain about species, and potentially stressed after a close encounter or property damage event.
Because sightings happen in places without formal addresses, the form uses tap-to-drop pin mapping first, then reverse geocoding to populate address fields. This reduces typing burden and improves data quality for HFWA response teams. The map defaults to Island Park to minimize zooming and interaction cost.
Attractant type is collected from a targeted list (trash, bird feeder, BBQ, pet food, chicken coop, bee hive, vehicle, fridge/freezer, ice chest, other). If "Trash" is selected, the follow-up "Was it in a bear-resistant trash can?" appears. Progressive disclosure captures critical operational detail while keeping default form complexity low.
Species (grizzly, black, unsure) is optional and links to an external identification guide. Making species mandatory would incentivize bad guesses or abandonment. Honest uncertainty is more actionable than confident incorrect data.
Fields are split into "Your Information" and "Sighting Details" to reduce context switching, set clear expectations, and improve completion confidence.
During project discovery, I learned that the phrase "wildlife crossings" carried political baggage in Island Park, despite broad support for reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions. The solution was reframing language toward outcomes ("protecting wildlife and landscapes" and "reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions") rather than contested policy terminology.
This was not dilution; it was audience alignment. The goal was to keep conservation intent intact while reducing unnecessary message rejection.
A core design objective was reducing developer dependence for routine content operations in a volunteer-run organization with limited tech budget. Backend authoring was treated as UX for internal users.
Principle: if the CMS is hard to use, frontend quality decays over time. Sustainable nonprofit UX requires maintainable backend patterns.
The design system was built around Island Park's landscape: natural, warm, and approachable without leaning on outdoor cliches.
"The site looks great and so much more professional."- HFWA Team
"You are amazing, we can not thank you enough for all of your help."- HFWA Team
Real-client design, even in volunteer contexts, requires balancing stakeholder alignment, scope, operational constraints, and local sensitivities. This project reinforced three core principles:
Volunteer project for Henry's Fork Wildlife Alliance, a 501(c)(3) in Island Park, Idaho. Site partially live as of March 2026.