Redesigning the UN Environment Website
Senior UX Designer at Popular Front
Executive Summary
The gap: The UN Environment Programme's web presence had grown into 82 sites and microsites, built over time by different teams with no shared experience strategy. The redesign needed to be rebuilt from research up, not just a visual refresh.
What I built: A multi-stream discovery effort spanning 21 multilingual surveys across seven languages, stakeholder interviews with content producers and the three core audiences, and a comprehensive evaluation framework applied across all 82 sites.
Why the design mattered: I built the evaluation rubric before leading a team doing the audits turning what could have been an unmanageable workstream into structured, defensible analysis. Frameworks scale; opinions don't.
Scale: 21 surveys, 7 languages, 82 sites audited, three research streams running in parallel.
Where it shows up today: Discovery produced a research-backed strategy and IA, three evidence-based audience archetypes, a prioritized roadmap from the audit framework, and the wireframes and technical specifications the engineering team used to build the new site in Drupal.
The Full Story
The Problem
The UN Environment Programme's web presence had grown into an ecosystem of 82 sites and microsites, built over time by different teams, for different audiences, with no shared experience strategy holding them together. The result was a sprawl: policy-makers, scientists, and environmental advocates were all trying to use the same digital surface, but the surface itself hadn't been designed with any of them specifically in mind.
The redesign couldn't just be a visual refresh. The strategy, information architecture, and page templates all needed to be rebuilt from research up, and the research had to account for an audience that spanned languages, regions, and professional contexts.
The Approach
I led discovery as a multi-stream effort, designed so the findings could anchor every downstream decision from sitemap to template specs.
Multilingual research at scale. I drafted, programmed, and analyzed 21 surveys across seven languages, fielded to the three core audience archetypes: policy-makers, scientists, and environmental advocates. The multi-language design was essential: a global audience can't be researched in English alone without losing the perspectives that matter most. The surveys surfaced how each audience actually used the sites, how they felt about the existing experience, and what they needed from a future one.
Stakeholder interviews across the organization. I led interviews with UN digital content producers, policy-makers, scientists, and environmental advocates to layer organizational perspective onto the user research. Combined with in-depth site analytics from a partner analyst, this gave me a 360-degree view that survey data alone couldn't provide.
Audience archetypes grounded in evidence. I synthesized survey findings, interview themes, and analytics into detailed archetypes for each of the three core audiences, capturing demographics, emotional drivers, and motivators. These weren't speculative personas; they were evidence-based profiles that gave the design team and stakeholders a shared mental model of who the work was for.
Site audits and heuristic evaluations across 82 properties. I built the evaluation framework and oversaw the team of two UX designers executing it, applying established usability heuristics alongside an assessment of content quality, technical performance, navigation structure, and visual design. At 82 sites, the framework was the work, without a consistent rubric, the audits would have produced 82 disconnected opinions rather than a coherent map of where the ecosystem was strong and where it was failing.
Translating discovery into design. I drafted a new sitemap that consolidated microsites where consolidation served the audience, simplified navigation across the ecosystem, and aligned with the patterns the research had surfaced. From there, I produced wireframes for the page templates, presented each phase to stakeholders for approval, and co-authored the technical specification documents the engineering team used to build the Drupal site front and back end.
The Impact
Discovery produced the foundation that every subsequent design and build decision was grounded in:
A research-backed strategy and information architecture. The new sitemap consolidated the ecosystem where it served the audience and streamlined navigation across the remaining properties, replacing decades of accreted structure with logic the research had validated.
Three evidence-based audience archetypes. Policy-makers, scientists, and advocates each got profiles grounded in survey, interview, and analytics data, giving design and content teams a shared reference point for every decision downstream.
A consistent evaluation rubric across 82 sites. The audit framework gave UNEP a defensible read on the strengths and weaknesses of its ecosystem, and a prioritized roadmap for what to fix first.
Templates and specs ready for build. Wireframes and technical specifications carried the research findings all the way through to engineering, so the insights didn't get lost in the handoff.
What I Took Away
A few things from this project I bring to every role:
Global audiences require global research. Running 21 surveys across seven languages was non-trivial, but research conducted only in English would have produced an experience that worked only for English-speaking users. The investment was the point.
Frameworks scale; opinions don't. Auditing 82 sites would have been impossible without a shared evaluation rubric. Building the framework first turned what could have been an unmanageable workstream into a structured, defensible analysis.
Discovery's value depends on the handoff. The wireframes and technical specs at the end of this project mattered as much as the research at the beginning, because they're what kept the findings alive through to build.