ABOUT THE PROJECT

The Council on Foreign Relations is the leading independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries. The Council's website brings together its many publications, groundbreaking analysis from leading experts, and multiple resources for its diverse stakeholders in its membership organization, government, business, and civil society.

The Council approached Tierra with a complex set of challenges: re-design the CFR.org homepage, address underlying navigational issues across the site in a phased approach, and launch a new video solution to support a new editorial strategy for the site. Tierra's team worked closely with the Council's executive management in a collaborative and consultative process over 6 months to launch the new site and several significant upgrades. Tierra's work with the Council has entailed several simultaneous projects including the following:

Strategy

As both a prelude to and ongoing part of Tierra's engagement with the Council, Tierra's team has served as a strategic adviser to the Council's executive management on issues related to its website publishing process, visual design and branding, technology, and analysis. Through a hands-on consultative approach, defining and refining an effective website strategy has been a critical and integrated part of every aspect of Tierra's engagement with the Council. Tierra's work in this area has included facilitation of strategy discussions, competitive analysis, evaluation of technology options and vendors, and preparation of strategic recommendations for the Council's leadership.

User Experience Research

Tierra recommended and delivered user experience research that evaluated CFR.org's 'competition', online branding, and navigational issues. In addition to surveys and interviews and research with a wide-range of CFR.org audience members, Tierra incorporate usability testing at several stages of the information architecture and visual design process for the new homepage re-design to refine and improve the site's overall user experience, user interface and navigation.

Homepage Re-Design

Starting with extensive discovery and strategy discussions, production of a detailed creative brief, and reviews with all senior executive management, Tierra's design team produced detailed information architecture (wireframes) and user interface options to explore several possible directions for the new CFR.org homepage. With Council input and user experience research, the options were narrowed and refined. In the subsequent visual design phase of the project, the same type of process was repeated, with iteration and exploration for each individual element on the the new page.

A critical part of the process was ensuring that an updated top-level navigation for the site would significantly improve user's experience while minimizing the impact on internal sections of the site that were not part of this re-design project. In addition, Tierra worked closely with the Council's institutional branding guidelines to adapt them for a new online style guide suited to overall site legibility. The visual re-design also revisited many typographical elements on the homepage and navigation to provide better visual clarity and focus site reader's attention on high-priority editorial content.

With Tierra's development team to support the visual design process, the project also entailed creating working prototypes for the new homepage. This enabled both the user experience researchers and the project team members to refine the site in a live, interactive context rather than a more typical static process. As a result, by the time the visual design was finalized and approved, it was also already functionally tested prior to going into development. This ensured that the final live page elements would look and work exactly as specified.

Video/Audio Solution Development

The new homepage design required prominent placement of a new video player and content. Utilizing open-source software and custom development as well as visual design specified during the re-design process, Tierra's design and development teams created a flexible new media player for CFR.org that is used both on the homepage as well as internal pages to support the Council's extensive video and audio content.