Earth Law Center: Accessible Environmental Advocacy

high fidelity prototypes for Earth Law Center

Timeline: Spring 2022 (3 months)
Team: Cornell Hack4Impact (designers: Jenn, Huey, Anna)
Client: Earth Law Center (Boulder, CO)

Every science teacher I’ve ever had has warned our classes of the looming threats that climate change pose; growing up in California, droughts and wildfires were the norm, the result of an exponentially warming world. That’s why I was especially excited to work on my first project as a UX designer for Hack4Impact, an engineering project team at Cornell. I was one of three UX designers on a subteam that worked with Earth Law Center, a legal non-profit that specializes in passing environmental laws to establish the rights of nature. Earth Law Center, or ELC, had reached out to us, asking us to build a website that would allow grassroots activists and everyday citizens to access law and letter templates to advocate for environmental justice.

1 | WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
As climate change becomes an increasingly immediate threat, more and more people are interested in getting involved in environmental activism. A primary barrier to entry for these aspiring activists is not knowing the language needed to appeal to their politicians or being unfamiliar with the common concepts of environmental justice. In other words, people want to get more involved with environmental activism, but don’t have a place to start that will help them overcome this initial knowledge barrier. This is because:

1. It’s difficult to navigate the legal jargon and nuances in environmental advocacy
2. People who want to reach out to their political representatives may not know what to say
3. There are many areas of environmental advocacy, which can be difficult to differentiate for those new to environmental justice

Specifically, ELC tasked us with developing a website that would allow users to customize templates for both environmental laws (which would be used by more experienced environmental activists) and letter templates to send to political representatives (which would be used for the average person looking to get more involved in environmental justice).

2 | USER RESEARCH
To kick off our design process, ELC provided us with some contacts — various community organizers and activists — that we could interview for our user research. We wrote up an interview script and took copious notes during the user interviews to ensure that we were able to capture an accurate user profile. Afterwards, we grouped our notes to formulate insights on our users. Quickly, we realized that we would be designing for two distinct users: existing environmental activists and community organizers, as well as people looking to learn more and get more involved in environmental justice.

notes from user interviews

From these notes, we gathered the following insights:

1. Activists use past legal documents and language to inform and reference back to in their work on current advocacy materials
2. New users want streamlined and efficient access to customizable letter templates
3. People feel that personalizing and being as specific as possible in their advocacy work is important

3 | BRAINSTORMING + SKETCHES

From these insights, my co-designers and I constructed the following information architecture for an MVP:

information architecture

A previous iteration of our MVP attempted to also sort letter templates by category, but we quickly realized that doing so would be redundant and confusing. Unlike the law templates, which are more distinct based on category, the letter templates tend to be more generic, making the categories an additional, unnecessary step!

With the information architecture of our MVP, we continued our brainstorming with some low fidelity sketches. At this step, I mostly focused on the law template and landing pages, which are shown here:

low fidelity sketches for the landing page

4 | MEDIUM FIDELITY DESIGNS

From our sketches, we went through a few weeks of iterations. Each week, we would attend three different meetings:

1. Design critique, where we would get feedback on our designs from designers on other subteams
2. Partner calls, where we updated employees at ELC, as well as gain more insight into their own vision for this website
3. Subteam standup, where we would sync up with the developers and project managers on our subteam

Through this process, the law template feature went through various iterations as we determined what would be the best design for users.

first round of medium fidelity prototypes

We did explorations on different card designs and category filters. After our partner requested the ability to incorporate filters on jurisdiction and type of law, we did a few explorations on how to best add this functionality.

second round of medium fidelity

5 | HIGH FIDELITY

This project was by far the most collaborative UX design project I’ve worked on. Our screens were narrowed down and selected not just by thinking about user needs and user testing, but listening to the preferences of ELC employees and taking input from fellow designers.

Once the screens were selected, we began to work on the UI and visual design elements of our screens. This was probably our largest roadblock, as ELC had requested that we use similar, but not identical colors to the existing ELC color palette, so we were more limited than I was accustomed to. Ultimately, we chose to go with a more minimalist visual design, as it detracted the least to the large amount of information on the screen.

high fidelity screens

6 | FINAL PROTOTYPE

A semester and many work sessions and meetings later, we presented our final prototype to ELC. While only the law templates page was highlighted in this case study, we went through similar rounds of revisions for each screen. The developers have already started development to turn our prototype into an actual website, which was completed December 2022. You can take a look at the site here!

7 | REFLECTION

Working with Earth Law Center this semester was the first time I’ve underwent the UX design process with a third party — in classes, I design without having to communicate directly with a third-party organization. While it was initially a challenge learning how to combine the priorities of ELC executives with the insights garnered from user interviews, I know that finding a balance between users’ needs and an organization’s personal agenda is an essential skill for any future career in product design. Additionally, my first semester working on this project team has allowed me to meet and learn from so many talented designers — from my co-designers to my mentor within the project team. In the semesters ahead, I’m excited for the upcoming projects I’ll be able to design for alongside these talented designers and great friends!