I designed a website and organizational framework to bring together all of the Fishery Solutions Center's tools and resources in a way that better supports our EDF regional teams working directly with fisheries around the world.

 

EDF aims to end the overfishing crisis in our lifetimes by reforming the fishing policies and practices of 12 governments that—along with those already reformed—account for 70% of the global catch, helping tip the world’s seafood system to sustainability. It is a bold goal, and we cannot succeed alone. Our strategy hinges on empowering others to lead the way. In each region we work with fishermen, fishery managers, scientists, investors, government officials and nonprofit partners.

 

EDF’s Fishery Solutions Center (FSC) has developed a comprehensive set of tools and resources that enable fishery practitioners around the world to design and implement sustainable fishery management programs from start to finish. The tools channel decades of knowledge and expertise to support practitioners in diagnosing the challenges, opportunities, drivers, and dynamics within their system and then help to inform strategies for more effective design and implementation of successful projects.

 

Currently, these tools are organized on an accessible, user-friendly website designed to systematize the support EDF’s Oceans staff provides to fisheries around the world.

​

From the inception of this project, I led our team through a human-centered design process to develop the Fishery Toolkit website we have today.

 

We started this work in 2015 with the idea that the FSC needed to be able to support our regional teams in a more systematic way as we were expanding into new geographies. I worked with the team to define the underlying challenge, interview regional team members to understand their needs, and catalogue our existing resources.

 

Using this research and a design-thinking style workshop I organized and facilitated, we produced a generic roadmap of our fisheries projects that would eventually become the organizing framework for our website. We also identified a number of gaps in our existing toolkit, and went on to develop additional tools to fill those gaps.

 

Throughout this early development, we tested our ideas with regional teams and refined the drafts based on their feedback, to make sure we were creating something that they would find useful.

​

As we continued to work on the project, I realized we needed a website to organize and host all of the new tools and ideas we were producing. I created an early version of the toolkit website and we have been working on testing and iterating it ever since. You can see a snapshot of an early version of the website on the slideshow above. 

​

In 2016 and 2017, I took a lead role in coordinating across the FSC to update the structure of the website and add new content. I used human-centered design principles to design an internal feedback protocol that was used to check in with regional teams and other EDF Oceans staff to learn about website use, challenges, and needs. Using this feedback, I led our team through a process to find key insights and create a strategic direction plan that prioritizes feedback and allowed us to determine next steps for the website.

​

Alongside all of this toolkit website design, we applied the tools therein to the fisheries we work on to generate important insights to guide our work. 

 

In 2018, we updated our outward facing website so that we can make more of the resources in the toolkit available externally. Visit http://fisherysolutionscenter.edf.org/fisheries-toolkit/project-phases to explore the toolkit firsthand.

​