Reclaim is a water-conservation campaign with elementary to middle school children as the main audience. Parents are the secondary audience because they will need to get involved for their children. One of the most important aspects of the campaign is the non-profit's website, to which will need to cater to children.
Research:
Having a water-conservation website that would cater to children would be challenging because they have a short-attention span. This is especially when we need to compress a great amount of information down to a few sentences.
As said, Reclaim's main goal is to increase awareness and teach and have people save as much water as they could.
User Flow:
Once a child like Madison wants to understand something, they ask a lot of questions or look up something. That is, especially when they saw something that they couldn't comprehend at first.
Ideation:
Initially, the home website would be interactive as well as informative to draw children in and keep scrolling all the way to the end. The water droplet follows the scrolling pattern from the faucet to the footer, where it will immerse and generate a ripple animation in the footer.
The feedback to the first round of sketches is that it's too informative and would not be appealing for children for two reasons: 1) they have a short-attention span and 2) they prefer a lot of colors.
As the Reclaim project evolves, a water-droplet mascot named Blu is added. Therefore, their suggestion to the water droplet is, "What if it's Blu instead?"
With Blu's brief, brief dialogues, the information children need to understand is compressed for their short-attention span. Feedback for the second round has generally been positive, however, they feel that the tips could be expanded into different sections of the house. They also would like to see the effects Blu would cause to show how water is a critical part of our lifestyle, such as when Blu would touch a parched land only for it to become green and flowing with water again.
Later on, I have invented two sub-campaigns, one of which involve a blue bucket. The #BluBucket sub-campaign involves children using one of the campaign-provided buckets to collect rainwater. It was a perfect implementation to the footer as Blu falls to the end, and is saved as much as a drop.
The website went through a couple revisions, before it's finalized with Blu changing some of the home elements to blue as he falls through each section. Parents can still look up their page to understand the goal of Reclaim and how they can get their children or family to participate in the campaign. The contacts page has a form submission as well as social media icons for parents to check out the campaign.
The Final Product:
Website demonstration. It has evolved to become a storybook-like one-page scroller coming from a generic information-sharing website.
A lot of children these days use some form of mobile device, commonly tablets to play games and watch videos. Under parent's supervision, they would be able to browse the Internet safely and come across the website.
iPhone and Android website version. Blu will be hidden behind the slideshow sections so as to not hinder the user being able to view the content. The slideshows can be browsed through by finger swiping.
Conclusion:
With a powerful ending with the hashtags, the user's parents can find out that there is more beyond the website and contribute to a good cause with their children. The children, after "reading" the website, goes on to adopt water-saving habits.
A lot can go through development of a website, no matter what audience it caters to, even though the key audience is elementary to middle-school children.