Enhancing the measurement of natural capital
Climateworks Centre, an Australian not for profit organisation affiliated with Monash University, is accelerating the shift to a sustainable, low-carbon future through strategic philanthropy, policy advocacy, and diverse stakeholder collaboration. They approached us with an exciting challenge: they wanted us to transform their groundbreaking 'Natural Capital Measurement Catalogue' (NCMC), currently formatted as a large spreadsheet of data, into a user-friendly online resource.
UX strategy
Visual design
Web development
The challenge
Years of groundbreaking research by Climateworks Centre had resulted in the ’Natural Capital Measurement Catalogue’ (NCMC).
This ‘first of its kind’ comprehensive spreadsheet of data was created to help stakeholders across industries quantify the diverse components of the natural world - such as ecosystems, species, and their services - in economic terms. Ultimately helping them to assign monetary and non-monetary values to these natural assets. So they can integrate their worth into decision-making processes, better balancing economic development with environmental preservation.
The problem? This transformational catalogue currently existed as hundreds of cells of data that - in its current iteration - was difficult for potential users to navigate and decipher.
The team at Yoke took a highly complex, multi-faceted spreadsheet and successfully transformed it into a user friendly interface. We're really pleased with how the WordPress website is looking, and the support and guidance we've been offered through this whole process.
Freya Harding - Engagement Coordinator
The solution
Climateworks Centre needed an accessible website format that would transform the NCMC from a dense spreadsheet, into a searchable, organised catalogue – where users could be 3 or 4 intuitive clicks away from the results they needed to make their calculations.
So we got to work – first understanding the parameters of the data; how it was grouped; the hierarchy, and the patterns that we could us to our advantage. Then we started to experiment with a sitemap and prototypes - visualising the most streamlined user journey we could.
Then we sat down with both the creators of the spreadsheet, and then future users of the catalogue, to test our theories. Presenting basic iterations of the web version of the catalogue to generous and curious people from a spectrum of user groups. Who were able to give us invaluable insight into how they would use the website, what data they needed to extract, and how we could best serve their needs.
Impact
In conclusion, the transformation of a dense but groundbreaking spreadsheet of data, into the accessible and user-friendly 'Natural Capital Measurement Catalogue' (NCMC) website, represents a pivotal step in bridging the gap between environmental conservation and economic decision-making.
Empowering stakeholders across industries to quantify and integrate the economic and non-monetary values of natural assets, ultimately encouraging and enabling a more sustainable and low-carbon future.
Whilst the contents of the website are technical, the backend of WordPress is intuitive and easy to navigate. It has allowed us to present and collect information in different ways, including multiple 'landing' pages to navigate for information, a slide out 'Help and Glossary page' and a pop up 'feedback form'.
Freya Harding - Engagement Coordinator
