Role
Product Designer
Date
April-May 2025
Tags
Team project, Web page redesign UX/UI design, End-to-end process
Tools
Figma, Miro
Team
The 'Meet the Team' design team consisted of:
• Collette C. - Project Manager
• Maria C. - User Researcher
• Myself - Product Designer
• Ankita M. - Content Designer
• Rachelle A. - Photographer
• Cerie H. - Accessibility Tester
• Temitope O. and Susan S. - SEO Specialists
Project overview and goals
Designing for trust and transparency: The ‘Meet the Team’ page for East London Waterworks Park
East London Waterworks Park (ELWP) is a grassroots charity project to transform a 14-acre Thames Water depot into a community-owned, biodiverse park with wild swimming ponds and inclusive public spaces. In early 2025, ELWP began a major website redesign to reflect its updated branding and improve user engagement and accessibility. As part of this effort, I joined as a volunteer product designer to lead the design and delivery of a new 'Meet the Team' page.
Goals:
• Enhance user engagement through authentic storytelling and compelling visual design.
• Ensure long-term sustainability with a flexible, easy-to-maintain system.
• Increase volunteer interest and sign-ups post-launch.
Business and user problem
A missing human connection
ELWP has a passionate, diverse volunteer community, but its online presence lacks representation, making the site feel impersonal and undermining its grassroots ethos.
The current ELWP website provides only a limited overview of the directors and volunteers.
The current website attracts over 1500 unique users monthly, but average engagement is just 1 minute and 25 seconds. User interviews revealed that while visitors are interested in the project, they struggle to find relatable content. The goal is to humanise the website experience to enhance engagement and encourage exploration.
So,
How might we make the East London Waterworks Park website feel more personal, relatable, and community-driven so visitors feel more connected and inspired to get involved?
The solution
Personalising the park: Building a connection with a 'Meet the Team' page
We created a ‘Meet the Team’ page to foster human connection and engagement. It showcases the passionate volunteers behind ELWP and aims to encourage visitors to interact more deeply with the site through storytelling and visuals.
The final design of the ELWP 'Meet the Team' page.
Scope and constraints
Balancing vision with volunteer realities
This project focused specifically on the creation of a Meet the Team page as part of the wider ELWP website redesign. This also included:
• Researching best-in-class examples of non-hierarchical team pages.
• Developing and refining a creative concept rooted in storytelling and community.
• Designing a responsive, accessible page aligned with the new brand direction.
As with many volunteer-led initiatives, time and coordination presented key challenges:
• Volunteers needed flexibility and patience for scheduling meetings and interviews while balancing ELWP work with personal and professional commitments.
• Tight deadlines: We worked to a condensed timeline to ensure the page would launch alongside the redesigned website, requiring efficient decision-making and prioritisation.
• The project needed to align with the broader website redesign timeline, incorporating input from various teams and stakeholders.
Users and audience
From curious visitors to committed contributors
The 'Meet the Team' page was designed with multiple audiences in mind, all of whom engage with East London Waterworks Park in different ways:
• Residents and community members who are curious about the project and want to understand who is behind it.
• Potential volunteers seeking a sense of the team culture, diversity, and values before getting involved.
• Supporters and donors looking for transparency, credibility, and a human connection to the cause.
Kick-off meeting and desk research
First steps, shared vision
The project started with a remote meeting, during which volunteers aligned on goals and roles. Using Miro, we mapped responsibilities and conducted a competitor analysis for team pages.
The exercise helped us identify preferred photography and content styles, highlighting a casual tone and brief personal stories about each volunteer’s journey with ELWP.
Our Miro board of photography style analysis
Our Miro board of various 'Meet the Team' pages of competitors
As a new volunteer, I needed to understand our users quickly. I adapted personas created by the ELWP team to better reflect the needs of remote prospective volunteers for the Meet the Team project.
Pilar Hernandez represents the type of user who would benefit most from a human-centred, story-driven team page that makes ELWP’s community more visible and accessible.
Pilar Hernandez - A prospective volunteer of ELWP
Concept development
Celebrating community through story
The ‘Meet the Team’ page serves as a directory of names and roles. It embodies ELWP’s community-driven ethos with a personal and visually engaging design that moves away from traditional corporate styles.
Following our initial meeting, we analysed various inspiring team pages from grassroots campaigns, creative collectives, and mission-driven organisations. Key takeaways included:
• Narrative-driven content encourages deeper user engagement than static bios.
• Non-linear layouts better reflect flat structures and collaborative cultures.
• Consistent tone and visual identity are essential to building trust and coherence.
From the research, I created three initial concepts, each with unique visual and structural approaches:
Story Grid, The Thread and Biodiversity Lens design approaches I considered
After team feedback, we chose the Story Grid concept for its clarity and modern design. It would be easily maintainable and an efficient use of screen space, benefiting mobile users. Its card-based layout enhances personal storytelling with photos and narratives.
Design and implementation
Building a story-led page that can grow with us
With the Story Grid chosen, we moved into the design phase, creating a user-friendly experience that meets ELWP’s needs.
The colour palette was pre-defined as part of ELWP’s recent rebrand. It combines vibrant and grounded tones to reflect the project’s environmental focus and community spirit.
ELWP's updated colour palette is part of their rebrand.
The visual design emphasised simplicity, inclusivity, and consistency with the park’s branding. I maintained a clean, image-led interface to let team members’ stories shine. Key design considerations included:
• Responsive card-based layout optimised for both desktop and mobile.
• Accessible design choices including clear contrast, scalable text, and keyboard navigation.
The first mockup was tested with sample content to ensure readability, scalability, and emotional tone.
First mockup of the ELWP 'Meet the Team' page
Iterations
Designing for everyone, through iteration
I shared the mockup with the team, and the feedback was positive. However, suggestions, including this one, were made:
Based on the above stakeholder feedback, highlighting that our '100% volunteer-led' status is a unique selling point, I redesigned this section to give it greater visual impact. The phrase was bolder using Sunny Yellow from the brand palette, drawing attention to ELWP’s grassroots foundation.
A clear call-to-action button was also added beneath the text to encourage interested visitors to sign up to volunteer.
Iteration 1: Emphasising the USP
Furthermore, feedback from the accessibility team included:
I improved this by:
• Moving all images to the left, followed by the text descriptions, for improved, consistent legibility and flow.
• Added visual hierarchy with bold names, clear roles, and ELWP-colour-coded tags for additional clarity.
• Once the content from the director interviews was finalised from user research and content design, I added this in, along with speech marks, enforcing the organisation's volunteer-led voices.
Iteration 2: Improving accessibility
Results and impact
A more human tone
The redesigned Meet the Team page was well-received by the wider ELWP design team, who praised its balance of storytelling, visual clarity, and alignment with the organisation’s values. The design is now approved and awaiting integration into the complete website redesign.
While the Meet the Team page is still awaiting release as part of the wider ELWP website redesign, I tested a near-final version with a small group of potential volunteers to gather early feedback.
Out of 5 users who previewed the page:
• 100% said the personal stories made them feel more connected to the project.
• 100% said it gave them a clearer sense of how they could get involved.
• 80% of participants said the page made them more likely to volunteer with ELWP.
This early validation suggests that the page effectively humanises the project and helps bridge the gap between curiosity and commitment.
Reflection
Strengthening collaboration through better documentation
If I were to approach this again, I would improve the internal workflow by better documenting version changes and design decisions throughout the process. This would make it easier for others to follow and contribute collaboratively, especially in a volunteer-driven team environment.
