A nonprofit organization dedicated to funding scientific research into the biological and physiological
effects of meditation on the human body needed to evolve its website to better support both research
visibility and community engagement.
A key challenge emerged from community feedback: although users were interested in the research being
supported, many struggled to understand the findings and their implications.
To address this, the organization had introduced additional content formats such as summaries, videos,
interviews and organizational updates across multiple channels (newsletter, social media, messaging
platforms). Meanwhile, maintaining credibility within the scientific community required to keep presenting
research in its formal and structured way, creating tension between accessibility and rigor,
resulting in a fragmented experience, where content was distributed as it came up across platforms,
rather than living within a single, structured and accessible system.
Their website then carried two kinds of weight: the research it supported, and the community forming
around it. While the platform provided access to research papers and organizational initiatives, all the
content had grown without a clear structure, making it difficult for their users to find and filter
information based on their intent.
The design challenge was to organize this content ecosystem into a clear and scalable experience,
separating distinct domains such as research and community, while enabling users to access, understand,
and engage with content in ways that matched their needs and preferences.
Approach
Before shaping any new structure, I mapped the existing site architecture, charting how content was
currently organized and how sections related to each other.
Content existed, but lacked clear structure,
hierarchy, and relationships between sections.
The exercise made clear where the gaps were: Over time, content had accumulated without a defined hierarchy, and
relationships between sections were either absent or implied. The Explore page functioned as a general
repository for all the topics, combining multiple content without a planned categorization.
I worked with an initial sitemap direction handed after business exploratory sessions, along with
insights from client conversations about their current state, challenges and their community feedback
notes.
The initially proposed structure defined key content areas
but still required refinement to support clearer navigation, content relationships, and user
understanding.
I focused on taking a directional proposal and turned it into a structure that could actually hold the
organization's content, serve its different audiences, and scale as they grew. Focusing on providing an
experience that felt complete and intentional throughout the entire site, with enough connections to
offer discoverable paths for every audience:
Separate content into distinct domains (Research and Community)
Introduce structure into libraries to group related content
Define clearer relationships between sections
Match the organization's community needs and preferences to consume content
Solution
The first part was all about structure.
Reorganizing the architecture so every important area could have a defined space: Organization's story,
donors information, grant committee, shared missions organizations.
The architecture was reorganized into two primary content domains that support both research visibility
and community engagement:
Research: formal outputs such as papers, research library, grants, and scientific
content
Community: engagement through news, events, collaborations, donations and
storytelling content
This system provides a consistent way to access
content and support future growth without restructuring the site.
Next, the inner layers: every main area has its own content library with filtering options to select
categories and content type, which allows it to group related information while supporting content
accessibility.
Added flexibility made the content more approachable. By grouping categories into clear structures and
giving accessible formats a real home in the system as filters, the platform could help community
members understand research findings without ever simplifying the science itself, keeping things
rigorous for a scientific audience then made reachable for everyone else.
At the same time, Community content continued to buzzed in as it came up on Newsletters, social media and messaging
platforms, but was given structure and findability as a News & Events library that served as the single
source that offered the depth of the scope for the Organization activities and accomplishments.
The structure of the site also worked to keep research and community connected rather than separate.
Reusable content sections link users from a piece of research to the community activity around it ( the
events, the updates, the conversation) so the experience holds together as people move between learning,
participating, and contributing.
Outcome
The redesign gave the organization a structure that could finally hold both sides of what it does:
research and community. Two distinct domains of content, with many ways to move between them. Content
now had defined places to live.
The structure shipped. The interconnectivity proposal got deferred for a possible later improvement. It
passed client review, went through real validation before release, and is now live. What comes next is the part only real use can answer.
Now that all that scattered content lives in one place, I'd want to know if the full scope of the organization is
finally sensed and legible, or if it lands as too much at once.
And the question under all of it: now that the whole picture is visible, does it change how people
understand the organization itself (how deep its support for research runs, how wide its community
reaches, how fully it lives its purpose?) And if it does, that clarity might do more than help people
navigate. It might bring new people in.