World Pulse is a powerful online community of women and allies worldwide who speak out about and build solutions to the biggest challenges in their societies. As an organization and social media community, they empower women leaders on the ground by advancing their digital, leadership, and journalism skills to mobilize communities and create real social transformation. World Pulse sought to rebuild their website for several reasons:

• It was not accessible on mobile devices (used by a majority of their users)
• There were backend performance and frontend maintainability concerns
• It was built on the aging Drupal 6 platform
• Members found it difficult to author their own content
• The site did not support multilingual content or UI beyond Google Translate
• It was sometimes difficult for users to understand

In truth, the site was in good shape for one as heavily used and exponentially grown as it had been over the previous six years, but it was time for change. As design lead on the project, working with two engineers and a UX strategist, we developed a new Drupal 7 site with:

• A refreshed look that was still consistent with visual branding guidelines,
• A focused on simplifying user flows and calls to action to facilitate contributions by allowing:
  • More focused discussions around specific topics through Groups, powered by Organic Groups
  • Sponsored initiatives, powered by Action Prompts, a content type, which display across the site, calling users to write about specific topics and then aggregating those responses
• A fully responsive frontend with progressive enhancements supporting functionality back to IE8,
• Features geared toward easier authorship of content, including:
  • Ability to save and manage drafts
  • Granular permissions, by publishing publicly, to Groups, to friends, or totally privately
  • Adding cover images, image galleries, videos, and file attachments to posts
  • Easily relating content to site-wide taxonomies (regions and topics) to allow for easier content discovery
• Native content and UI translation with RTL support (although only English and French are currently active)