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---

## At a glance

- **Client**: Field Notes Collective (environmental research nonprofit)
- **Year**: 2025
- **Role**: Lead researcher and information architect
- **Duration**: 6 weeks
- **Team**: Solo, with weekly check-ins to FNC's communications lead

## The problem

FNC had 14 years of field research locked in Dropbox folders. This included interviews, soil sample reports, and climate logs. New researchers could not find prior work. Old researchers had no confidence their work would stay findable.

They had a budget for "a website." But they did not know if they needed a CMS, a static archive, or something else.

## What I did

**Week 1 — Discovery.** Twelve 45-minute interviews with current and former field researchers in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. The pattern was clear: people needed to find work *by location and topic*, not by author or date. The old folder layout made both impossible.

**Week 2 — IA design.** Card-sorted 200 sample documents with five people. Chose a two-axis system: ecological zone (12 types) crossed with topic (8 types). A tree test showed task success rose from 32% to 89%.

**Weeks 3-5 — Build.** Worked with FNC's part-time developer to move documents into a static-site archive. Added full-text search and per-axis filtering.

**Week 6 — Handover.** Wrote a guide for adding new documents. Trained two staff members in 90 minutes each.

## Outcome

- Search-to-find time dropped from 11 minutes to 47 seconds (same 8 tasks, before and after)
- The two trained staff have added 36 new documents in four months with no support questions
- FNC's funder cited the archive as a key factor in renewing their three-year grant
