Conservation Gateway is The Nature Conservancy’s centralized hub for conservation science, providing researchers, conservation practitioners, policymakers, and internal teams access to thousands of scientific resources, datasets, publications, tools, and research materials.
When I became involved with the project, the platform had accumulated years of technical debt, governance challenges, and usability issues. The site contained over 5,000 research assets, but much of the experience had become difficult to maintain, difficult to navigate, and difficult to evolve. Previous migration efforts had struggled because the challenge was larger than moving content into a new platform.
The real problem wasn’t the website.
The real problem was creating a sustainable system capable of supporting conservation science for years to come.
My role focused on helping bridge strategy, UX, governance, technical feasibility, and implementation planning while supporting the migration of the platform into Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). I also helped hire and onboard a dedicated UX designer who would continue evolving the platform after launch.
The original Conservation Gateway had become a valuable but increasingly difficult platform to manage.
Some sections were actively maintained by individual business units, while other areas had been largely neglected. There was no clear long-term ownership model, governance structure, or sustainable process for ongoing improvement.
The project had failed multiple times before because of its scale.
The platform contained more than 5,000 resources and represented years of accumulated conservation knowledge. At the same time, stakeholders wanted the platform to become the long-term destination for conservation science across the organization.
The challenge extended beyond user experience. The team needed to answer foundational questions:
Research also surfaced several experience challenges:
Senior UX Designer
While my title was Senior UX Designer, my role extended well beyond designing screens and features. Because the project had struggled for years due to unclear ownership, governance challenges, and the complexity of migrating thousands of research resources, I became heavily involved in conversations around platform strategy, stakeholder alignment, technical feasibility, implementation planning, and long-term sustainability.
At the same time, I remained actively involved in the UX work itself. I helped shape the platform’s information architecture, reviewed and refined wireframes, designed new features and custom components, enhanced existing AEM components, and contributed to the search, filtering, and resource discovery experience. A significant portion of my work focused on translating research findings and stakeholder needs into practical solutions that could be implemented within the constraints of AEM and our development capacity.
I also served as a bridge between discovery and implementation. After the agency completed its research and recommendation phase, I worked closely with product owners, developers, and release teams to evaluate feasibility, define priorities, create Jira stories, and help move the work into production.
As the project grew, I helped hire and onboard a dedicated UX designer to focus on Conservation Gateway. My role evolved into a combination of contributor, advisor, and mentor, helping provide historical context, strategic guidance, and support while creating space for the designer to take ownership of the platform’s continued evolution.
The discovery effort included:
Several themes emerged consistently.
Stakeholders across the organization agreed there was significant value in creating a centralized location for conservation science.
Teams needed a place to store, share, discover, and reference research resources, scientific publications, conservation methodologies, and supporting tools.
Users approached content in different ways. Some searched by geography. Others searched by conservation topic. Others searched by specific scientific disciplines or resource types.
Effective discovery required flexible search pathways supported by a scalable taxonomy system rather than a rigid site structure.
One of the most important findings wasn’t related to interface design.
Stakeholders repeatedly highlighted challenges around content ownership, publishing processes, maintenance responsibilities, and website governance.
Without solving those challenges, any redesign would eventually face the same problems as the legacy platform.
The redesign was guided by three strategic principles.
Previous migration efforts focused primarily on moving content. This initiative focused on creating a system that could be maintained, governed, and improved over time.
Governance became a core consideration rather than an afterthought.
With thousands of resources spanning numerous topics, disciplines, and content types, effective discovery required more than navigation updates.
The platform needed a scalable taxonomy model that could support filtering, search, metadata, future migrations, and growing content libraries.
The platform wasn’t being built solely for its existing 5,000 resources. Future plans included migrating more than 150 conservation-related sites into the ecosystem over time.
Every architecture, governance, and search decision needed to support both present and future needs.
The final solution established Conservation Gateway as a scalable AEM-based platform for conservation science.
One of the most significant features was the development of a resource aggregation framework.
Each resource receives its own structured page built around metadata including title, summary, content type, and supporting information. This metadata powers aggregation, filtering, and search experiences, making it easier for users to discover relevant content across thousands of resources.
The team modernized the search strategy and laid the groundwork for more advanced discovery capabilities.
This included:
The redesign also established:
One of the most interesting challenges throughout this project was that Conservation Gateway needed to behave very differently from nature.org while still operating within many of the same organizational and technical constraints.
Nature.org is primarily designed to support storytelling, engagement, and fundraising. Conservation Gateway serves a fundamentally different audience. Researchers, conservation practitioners, analysts, and policy leaders visit the platform looking for scientific resources, tools, datasets, publications, and specialized information. Their needs, behaviors, and expectations differ significantly from those of a typical nature.org visitor.
Despite those differences, both products share the same AEM platform, many of the same underlying components, development resources, and release processes. Building an experience optimized for research and discovery often required us to rethink how existing components could be adapted to support entirely different use cases. In many cases, we needed to decide whether to modify an existing component, create a new variation, or design around platform constraints altogether.
Resource limitations also influenced many design decisions. While we were eventually able to secure additional support, including a dedicated UX designer and development resources, the project never operated with a fully dedicated product team. Conservation Gateway continued to share release capacity with other organizational priorities, requiring us to make careful decisions about where custom functionality provided enough value to justify the additional investment.
This experience reinforced an important lesson for me: successful digital products are rarely shaped by user needs alone. They are also shaped by platform constraints, organizational realities, shared infrastructure, available resources, and the long-term cost of maintaining what gets built. Some of the most important decisions on this project were not about what we wanted to design, but about how to create the best possible experience within those constraints while still preserving a vision for future growth.