CREAF
Ecological and Forestry Applications
Research Centre
CREAF is a public research centre dedicated to terrestrial ecology, territorial analysis, and global change. It aims to contribute to the knowledge on conservation and management of the environment and territory, as well as adaptation to environmental change at local, regional, and global scales. CREAF seeks to bridge the gap between the academic world, administrations, and society, and to foster awareness within its field of action.
Founded in 1987 by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Institute of Catalan Studies, and the Government of Catalonia, it also has the support of the University of Barcelona and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
Goals
Given the vast amount of content and diverse audiences seeking different levels of information—from academic experts to the general public interested in outreach articles—the CREAF website serves as the core of the entity’s digital ecosystem. With organic growth parallel to its reputation, the goal was to bring order to its discourse, facilitating easy and intuitive content discovery.
Idea
The process focused on identifying friction points to introduce improvements in the architecture of the future website, helping the communication department to prioritise content according to its importance in the interface and establishing analysis criteria that could serve as a reference for evaluating improvement proposals.
Implementation
Within our analysis and strategy services area, we opted for a digital audit of the website to gain a deep understanding of user behaviour. This led to usability improvements and facilitated the design team’s work in creating a website that meets all the functions required by a multidisciplinary institution like CREAF.
