Last Tuesday, 240 of the country’s top climate scientists and experts released the third National Climate Assessment (NCA). The report details the current and best understanding of how climate change is already impacting Americans’ health and livelihoods in every region of the country. The takeaway from the report is that if you live in the United States, you’re either already dealing with climate change, or it is coming soon to your neighborhood.

When Forum One began working with the U.S. Global Change Research Program (GCRP) last year on a new design for globalchange.gov, we knew we had a big job, but we didn’t know we’d have such a big audience.

Our goal in redesigning globalchange.gov was to help GCRP bring context and transparency to global change research within the federal government. The release of the new NCA is an opportunity to draw attention to the issue of global change - and to showcase the wide range of related Federal information. As an example, our Browse section includes reports and datasets from the Global Change Information System (GCIS), a federal portal which houses climate change research drawn from thirteen federal agencies and organizations who study climate. In the long-term, we want to make it easy to trace the connections between the individual pieces of research that constitute “what we know” about climate change. 

Though our project team had lofty goals, we faced a lot of common website design challenges. One of GCRP’s organizational goals is to make their science accessible. If the scientific findings aren’t explained clearly, then the chances of anyone actually doing anything about it are slim. However, the site also has to work for scientists sharing their research, and policymakers and planners who want to understand how climate change will affect their communities. We needed a design that would help all of GCRP’s audiences find the information they need to make smart climate decisions. John Schneider, one of our senior user-experience designers, designed the overall information architecture that created unique paths through the site for each of GCRP’s key audiences.

One of our team’s first ideas was the Understand section of the site, which helps those new to climate change understand the “big picture” story of what’s happening, what it means, and how we know. The Explore section gives visitors a direct path to aggregation pages for the regions and topics that provide details and context to the overall NCA findings. The Browse section, as mentioned above, is the portal into the GCIS and all the climate data and research you could ever want. Through the Follow section, users can subscribe to GCRP news or social feeds, and the Engage section provides info on public events or other opportunities to get involved with the assessment process itself.

For visual design, we turned to our long-term partners at Antistatic Design to create the “slick” look & feel that beautifully showcases the stark reality of climate change on your desktop, mobile, or tablet device. Finally, our site search allows users to quickly find content within the overall website or just within the NCA report module itself, developed by the firm Habitat Seven and NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Climate & Satellites.

Between interesting design challenges and working with the brilliant and engaged staff over at GCRP, we had plenty to focus on beyond any attention from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Once we started to hear and see the attention on the recent IPCC report release, the whole project took on a new urgency. We were confident in the quality of our design, but at that point we knew that we needed to be equally confident in our hosting infrastructure. Suddenly it was clear that there was a lot of attention on the climate issue, and a hunger for new scientific research. We got wind of some traffic numbers from the IPCC report website, which we used to extrapolate a baseline expectation for our launch. We deployed a content delivery network (CloudFlare), and a page caching solution (Varnish). We conducted load testing and refined our hosting setup until we were confident that we could handle anything short of a highly-orchestrated DDOS attack. We also implemented FISMA compliance measures to ensure that the site and data was secure and only authorized users from GCRP and the development team were able to access administrative functions on the site.

On launch day, we knew pretty quickly that we were going to hit our targets. The site went online just after 8am, and by noon we had seen over 50,000 visitors. Over the next 48 hours, over a quarter-million people would browse the site or read the report. Dozens of reporters covered the White House stakeholders event – where our site received quite the hurrah from Presidential advisor John Podesta – and morning shows across the country were invited to send their meteorologists to interview the President. Throughout the day, our site held up as the numbers kept climbing and climbing. At least one person on Twitter seemed impressed:

There may not have been a lot of good news for the country in the latest NCA report, but we loved working with GCRP and our other partners on the new globalchange.gov. At Forum One, we spend a lot of time geeking out on the latest coding trick or UX trend, but what motivates us more than anything is helping our clients make progress on issues that matter, and this is a big one.

The message of the Third NCA is that climate isn’t a problem for tomorrow, but for today. Like climate change itself, changing the political consensus can be a staggeringly slow and incremental process, but once in a while, something new at the right moment can trigger rapid, cascading change. That’s what we need on the issue of climate change, and we hope that the redesigned globalchange.gov helps the American people understand why.

When Forum One began working with the U.S. Global Change Research Program (GCRP) last year on a new design for globalchange.gov, we knew we had a big job, but we didn’t know we’d have such a big audience.