The Client
Based in Philadelphia, this client runs one of the oldest immigrant and refugee services organizations in the city. Known for their robust “whole person” approach to services, they offer trauma-informed wraparound services to immigrants, refugees and survivors of torture and human trafficking. Their services range from legal aid to English classes, career coaching to therapy.
The Problem
The existing website presented several significant challenges.
Dated information architecture
The site had not been updated since 2016 and was originally designed around now-dated lines of service, with some program areas not featured on the site at all.
Diverse Audience Needs
The site served a wide range of users, including refugees and immigrants, service providers, and policymakers. The needs, goals and language requirements of each of these groups were diverse and not clearly understood by the client.
CMS Migration
The client wanted a scripted migration from their old CMS to a Drupal 9 instance due to lack of staff capacity, so new structured content had to be designed with logical transformation in mind.
The Solution
Inclusive Information Architecture
I designed a user-centric sitemap and mega-menu structure that prioritizes content based on specific audience groups. By utilizing first-person language and grouping services by “user type” rather than internal department, I created a navigation path specifically optimized for users whose first language may not be English.
Strategic Content Modeling
To prepare for the build in Drupal 9, I architected custom content types that balanced new discovery goals with the reality of the client’s existing data. I utilized creative taxonomy structures to generate dynamic landing pages, allowing for a robust browsing experience without requiring a heavy custom development lift.
Development-Driven Efficiency
To maximize the client’s limited budget, I collaborated early with the engineering team to design wireframes that strictly utilized the agency’s existing component library. I annotated these wireframes with specific backend logic and taxonomy rules, ensuring a smooth handoff that minimized scope creep and development hours.
Comprehensive Migration Mapping
created a detailed field-level migration map to bridge the gap between the legacy site and the new architecture. This document guided the backend team through complex field mergers, removals, and additions, and included a legal review to ensure the new taxonomy adhered to necessary compliance standards.
See the website live here: The Nationalities Service Center
How We Got There
To understand the organization’s needs and identify opportunities for improvement, we conducted a streamlined discovery process.
Stakeholder discovery
I created a client questionnaire to get input from key stakeholders about important aspects of the project, like pain points, goals, and measures of success. I also facilitated discovery meetings to identify key audiences, confirm project goals, and begin to flesh out site features and functionality.
Comprehensive IA documentation
I developed a Drupal-optimized content model and sitemap that restructured services by audience type using accessible, first-person language. This documentation bridged the gap between design and engineering by defining custom content types for legacy data migration and utilizing creative taxonomies to minimize the development lift required for dynamic landing pages.
Feature prioritization
I created a high-level list of site features to determine both the approximate levels of effort from developers and priority of importance from the client. From there, the entire team collaborated to determine what the MVP site would look like.
What I’m most proud of
One of the main problems this site had was that it had a ton of different information for many different audience groups, and wasn’t organized in a way for any audience group to really benefit.
After discovering the specific audience groups, and the content on the site that mattered most to them, I was able to create an accessible sitemap and data model that could serve all users. What I’m most proud was how I could creatively look at the structured data they already had in place and make it fit the needs I had just discovered in order to allow for better scripted migration.
As this organization continues to serve over 5,000 refugees and immigrants in the Philadelphia area each year, I hope that the site can likewise serve those refugees and immigrations for years to come.
Lydia Keener Stock 