global justice ecology project Case Study

project overview

Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) aims to effectively communicate the underlying causes of social injustice, ecological destruction, and economic domination on its website to raise awareness and secure donations. GJEP and our TechFleet team worked collaboratively in phase 1 to meet GJEP’s goals: understanding how users navigate the website, enhance GJEP website usability, increase donations, and improve user engagement and fundraising effectiveness.

My contributions as a member of the UX Writing team included:

  • Collaborated with the team on the creation and development of GJEP's evolving tone and voice

  • Structured and organized the Content Style Guide for GJEP; led team discussion surrounding grammar and style recommendations for GJEP's writing across their website

  • Drafted alt text for ~27 images on GJEP Take Action page

  • Participated in cross functional team meetings and presented work progress to the GJEP team for demos

who was involved / timeline

Organized by TechFleet, I was 1 of 3 UX Writing Apprentices, led by 2 UX Writing co-leads. As a UX Writing team, we collaborated with 4 cross-functional teams and the client - design, research, product management, product strategy, and Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP). We began phase 1 in September 2023 and handed over our deliverables in December 2023.

Initial portion of the Content Style Guide

defining voice and tone

With the structure of this volunteer project, all teams began work around the same time. This led to a scenario in which our content/writing team began defining the voice and tone for GJEP based on a competitive audit, GJEP’s goals for the project, and our own knowledge and perspectives. Product strategy set out several other non-profit organizations as ‘competitors’ to begin analysis for different aspects of the project. We looked at both the current GJEP website and the ‘competitors’ websites from a content design perspective and did an audit, analyzing their grammar choices, sentence case, their overall voice, reading level, etc. This information gave us a starting point on defining GJEP’s voice and tone moving forward, allowing us to give recommendations to further their mission and reach their goals.

During the last few weeks of this project, our research team shared results from surveys and usability tests. Two of our team members used this research to create a tone guide, making recommendations directly from insights learned from research results.

addressing accessibility

One of my favorite learnings from this project was how to address accessibility in content design, and from my visual design perspective, how those recommendations affect the overall design suggestions for the client. As a team, we looked at accessibility in grammar and SEO practices, using research to make educated recommendations. We looked at how a screen reader is able to read the website content and how that affects the user experience for users who are utilizing assistive technologies. I incorporated these grammar suggestions into the content style guide as recommendations for GJEP, addressing one of their goals to enhance website usability.

FigJam file, grey background with black text outlining different recommendations for content

FigJam team collaboraton on content style guide recommendations

FigJam file, grey background with black text outlining different recommendations for content

drafting alt text

Aside from drafting the initial Content Style Guide, I drafted alt text for images on the GJEP website, focusing on the ‘Take Action!’ page. A fellow apprentice and one of the co-leads created general recommendations surrounding alt text. A few of these recommendations included being as specific and concise as possible, limiting characters to ~125, look for ways to responsibly include keywords, and suggestions on how to inclusively write about gender and race.

Alt text: A large group of bees swarming an aged wooden structure that is painted white.

Alt text: Lucy slightly smiling, positioned in front of a body of water and green hills. Lucy has pale skin and their face is lit by the sun

project next steps

This concluded phase 1 of this project between TechFleet and Global Justice Ecology Project. From our larger team, GJEP received our content recommendations, as well as research results, product strategy documents, and initial wireframes for multiple pages. New team members will dive in to our hand-off documents, picking up where we left off to continue the project in phase 2, taking our recommendations to refine and implement across the GJEP website.