Piloting the new Planet 4 Information Architecture: the Greenpeace Brasil experience
How the first P4 site using the new Information Architecture came to life
Hey you! Since it’s my first time in this space, maybe it’s great to introduce myself. I’m Jean from São Paulo (Brazil) and I coordinate the Digital Mobilization team from Greenpeace Brazil, which is responsible for strengthening our digital channels e.g. website, CRM, social media, and data intelligence.
*Renata, the Data Intelligence Analyst in Greenpeace Brazil, also from São Paulo, contributed to this post. Thanks, Rê! 😃
Greenpeace Brasil launched Planet 4 in 2018, which is curiously when I also joined Greenpeace. As a journalist, the continuous effort to improve our website experience was not only a priority but also a wish since I began exploring our user journey. When me and my team heard that Greenpeace International (GPI) was developing a new Information Architecture, we became instantly interested.
Why we wanted to pilot this
The fundamental goal of P4 is to go beyond informing or gathering content and be a mobilization platform for all Greenpeace offices. When we saw that the new Information Architecture could actually be of great help in achieving the vision, we immediately thought: “when can we get it?”
We’re facing many challenges in the sphere of environmental activism in Brazil, and with human rights in general. Hence we wanted to build a website that explained our issues clearly, with huge space for hope and fostering people power. Greenpeace completed 30 years of activism in Brazil, so a new website that prioritizes user experience in presenting many acts of courage was very important for us.
The journey
With that vision in mind, we started collaborating with the Planet 4 team. The first step was adapting the navigation tests to our audiences, not only for the main menu, but also to shape up the new taxonomy and main pages that would link to the issues we focus on in our campaigns.
The main challenge on our journey is that we had roughly 2 months to go live (Greenpeace Brazil’s 30th anniversary was on April 26), but we made it! A rough timeline was also an opportunity to prioritize the most important decisions connected to our user research — in addition to the navigation tests, we also did an SEO audit to be sure that we were making the right decisions.
With clarity on what we wanted to do, it was time to think about how we wanted to do it. Having clear page types connected to the Information Architecture with previously defined blocks and templates helped us organize our content ideas. We also mapped all pages in the past structure to decide, one by one, if they would be migrated, merged with another or if we’d create new ones completely from scratch. This was also the time to apply the new taxonomy (menus, categories, tags).
Key learnings (and mistakes!)
The main — and maybe the most important — learning in the whole process is that we could have been a bit more clear on the ambition of revamping a whole website with a deadline of basically 2 months. We were very conscious that a tight timeline would contour all our decisions and maybe that was the fun of it, right?
The previous research and templates from GPI, built from working groups with different offices, were fundamental to guide our reflections about how to localize and adapt the Information Architecture to Greenpeace Brazil’s context. A very detailed project timeline, with clear content prioritization based on user research were key to ease the process.
A broader mistake I could point out, obviously a consequence of the tight deadlines, was little time for both teams from GPBR and GPI to meet and work together on the many different bits of building a new website. I love working asynchronously, but it’s also important to give space to brainstorm, be open about issues and worries, and sometimes being face to face makes it a lot easier. For example, in a one day in-person meeting the Brazil team advanced weeks in the roadmap (unfortunately no pics of this epic event).
Special mentions and a shoutout
It’s always hard to point out names because a huge team, directly or indirectly, helped make it possible that we had our beautiful website in place on time for the 30th anniversary.
I wanted to specially mention the core team from Brazil that worked really hard to make all this possible. Specifically, in alphabetical order: Lu Sudré, Institucional & Strategic Comms, that amazingly crafted many of the site’s content, Rafael Silva, Digital Support, who helped the whole team, Renata Persicheto, Digital Lead, that beautifully took care of every detail of the whole process, and Rickson Figueira, Tech Lead, who magically put our thoughts into code practice.
Also, a massive THANK YOU to the GPI team, specially Suzi (for being onboard with this pilot challenge), Magali (with her beautiful Miro boards and kind conversations) and the P4 dev team (for all the magic that made the Information Architecture possible).
Hope you enjoyed hearing about our experience. Please reach out to me in the comments below for any thoughts or suggestions, and feel free to contact the wonderful P4 team at planet4-pm-group@greenpeace.org. \o/
