OurGreenway

information architecture • ux research • wcag guidelines • developer handoffs

Our Greenway is a Toronto non-profit building sustainable mobility infrastructure across the city. Their website was organized around how the organization thought about its work, not how users tried to find it. Community members couldn't locate the event registration. Donors hit an unexplained redirect and bounced. Programs were buried two clicks deep inside a dropdown that listed everything at once.

I led the research strategy for this project, scoping five methods, running stakeholder interviews, facilitating a card sort, and conducting independent usability testing. Here's how the research shaped every major decision.

Timeline

10 Weeks

my role

I led the stakeholder interviews, open card sort, and usability testing, and took primary ownership of the IA redesign and accessibility audit. The competitive analysis and desk research were shared across the team.

I led the stakeholder interviews, open card sort, and usability testing, and took primary ownership of the IA redesign and accessibility audit. The competitive analysis and desk research were shared across the team.

Team

3 other UX design students

3 other UX design students

tools

Figma, UXTweak, ScreamingFrog

Preview Final Prototype

Prototype

Prototype

The Challenge

The Research

Design Decisions

The Challenge

“The website is not attracting people who want to invest in us.”

“The bigger priority is to help people find information easily and help them learn about the organization.”

Front page still reflects an old focus (Northwest Toronto), which no longer matches their actual scope.

Word from the stakeholders

The organization had grown citywide. The website hadn't.

Our Greenway started as a Northwest Toronto LRT advocacy group. By 2026, it was running international conferences, publishing mobility research, and operating community programs across Toronto. The website still introduced the organization as a neighbourhood initiative, and its navigation still reflected the priorities of 2019.

01
Programs were buried and hard to find

Active programs like Cycling Without Age sat two clicks deep inside "Our Work," a dropdown that listed all 10 sub-items at once, creating a wall of text before any real navigation happened.

02
"Events" had no home on the website

There was no Events section. Ride registration, conference info, and community programming were fragmented across individual program pages with no clear path to sign up.

03
Donating felt like hitting an error

The donate button redirected to York University with no explanation. Multiple usability participants assumed they'd broken something and abandoned the flow.

04
Research work was invisible

10+ reports and publications were buried inside the "Our Work" dropdown — no dedicated hub, no filtering, no way to browse. The content existed; users just couldn't reach it.

original homepage of the website

The Research

Five methods, each answering a different question

We ran five methods because each one could answer something the others couldn't.

Competitive Analysis

Deep comparison against Evergreen (client-specified) and WindReach — Canadian non-profits with comparable multi-program, multi-audience sites.

Content Audit

ScreamingFrog technical crawl plus manual WCAG 2.1 review. 19 issues surfaced across four priority levels — 3 of them critical.

Desk Research

Full map of navigation structure, page hierarchy, labeling consistency, click depth, and cross-linking gaps.

Stakeholder Interviews · 3


Teams calls with the Treasurer (SI1), Operations Coordinator (SI2), and CEO (SI3). Our goal was to understand organizational constraints before writing a single recommendation.

Open Card Sort · 5 Participants

18 real content cards on UXtweak. Participants freely grouped and named their own categories — revealing how they actually organized the content, without being led by existing nav labels.

Usability Testing · 6 Participants

Task-based sessions on the live site. We recruited independently rather than accepting the client's offer to supply participants from their own contact list.

What We Found

The ScreamingFrog crawl and manual WCAG 2.1 review surfaced 19 issues across four priority levels. The three critical findings were:

01
Broken Publications navigation link

Clicking Publications in the navbar did nothing. The 10+ years of research weren't shown in a consolidated way.

02
Donation flow actively harming conversion

The donate button landed users on an intermediate page with multiple links and an unreadable gif before any payment option appeared. Users didn't know where they were or what to do. The redirect to York University with no explanation led participants in usability testing assume they'd hit a phishing page.

03
Multiple H1 tags and broken keyboard navigation

Having multiple H1 headings breaks screen reader hierarchy entirely, and keyboard navigation wasn't fully supported across interactive elements, meaning users who couldn't use a mouse were blocked from core site functionality.

These were barriers affecting every visitor using assistive technology and every donor trying to give.

What the card sort told us

I observed that the users weren't cruising through the sort. They were working hard to figure out what each card meant. That cognitive effort is a direct symptom of content labels that don't communicate.

The clustering result, though, was unambiguous. Without any prompting, all five participants divided 18 content cards into exactly two groups, and never crossed between them. Cards within each cluster scored 80–100% similarity. Cross-cluster pairs: 0%

Cluster A — 100% agreement

Who we are & how to help

Our Plan · Our Team · Our Supporters · Contact Us · Join Us · Donate · Sign up for updates · Social Media

Users named these: "Who we are," "How to help us," "Actions"

Cluster B — 80–100% agreement

Programs, research & impact

Cycling Without Age · NACBC · Flightpath · The Greenway Effect · Micromobility · Dispatches · E-Cargo Roadshow

Named: "Research/Products," "Impacts" — or left unnamed entirely
What Usability Tests added

The usability test confirmed that the participants struggled most with two tasks.

  1. Finding event registration — It didn't have a coherent destination anywhere on the site.

  2. Completing a donation — The York University redirect, appearing without context, caused visible confusion. Several participants paused, read the URL bar, looked uncertain, and in two cases started to close the tab before continuing.

When I go to this page, it shows York University — it might make me feel it's "a phishing website.

- UT1 (While completing a donation related task)

I did not understand the website. It is complicated to navigate — there's no clear mission, vision, or experience of what we have done.

- Internal Stakeholders

It's unfortunate that events doesn't have its own tab.

- UT3 (while after completing the task to find an event)

words from Usability Test Participant

What participants responded to positively was the colorful illustrations and organized content blocks on the homepage. This led us to conclude that

the problem wasn't the design but the structure.

Problems identified in the current IA during usability tests

Design Decisions

  1. Restructured the navigation

  • 4/6 usability participants couldn't locate Programs conducted by OurGreenway, so we introduced it at the top level.

  • "Our Work" was overloaded - it held programs, publications, and research.

  • Participants were unsure whether "Join Us" meant events, membership, volunteering, or donating.

  • Removed "Brand" from the public navigation

after
  1. A renewed Footer for better Navigation
BEFORE

For users who scrolled past the main nav or landed mid-page, there was no secondary path to key content. The redesigned footer mirrors the new top-level navigation structure, giving users a full secondary map of the site — Programs, Research, Events, Get Involved — from any point on the page. This is particularly important for accessibility: users relying on keyboard navigation or screen readers often navigate via the footer rather than the top nav.

after
  1. Explained the York University donation redirect

Usability testing showed the York University redirect caused visible confusion and abandonment. The obvious recommendation was "fix the redirect." But the stakeholder interview revealed that York University is Our Greenway's primary research partner and processes donations as a registered Canadian charity, changing the infrastructure would require renegotiating a core organizational partnership.

So the recommendation changed: rather than fixing the redirect, explain it before it happens. A short note on the donate page — naming York University, describing the relationship, and confirming the redirect is intentional — resolves the confusion without touching infrastructure.

BEFORE
after
  1. Built a dedicated Research hub as a top-level tab

Publications and research reports were previously buried in the "Our Work" dropdown, listed by individual title with no way to browse or filter. The Publications nav link was broken entirely. The redesign creates a standalone Research page with all content in one place, filter and sort controls, and a clear entry point from the top nav.

after

Learnings

On participant recruitment

The organization naturally wanted to hear from people who already engaged with their work. But "people who already know the site" is not the same as "people who need to find their way around the site." Pushing back on the client's offer to supply usability participants was the right call, the navigation failures we found would have been invisible to a familiar audience.

Define success criteria before execution, not after

The SMART criteria we agreed with the client at the end of discovery gave the execution phase something to design toward — and give the post-launch evaluation something to measure against. Without a baseline and a target, there's no way to know if the redesign actually worked.

What worked

Running stakeholder interviews before writing recommendations. The York University donation flow looked like broken UX from the outside. The interviews revealed it as an organizational constraint, which meant the right solution was a content fix, not a technical one. That shift only happens when you understand the constraint first.

What I'd do differently

Recruit more age-diverse usability participants earlier. Testing with a younger-skewing recruited sample meant we caught navigation failures but may have missed accessibility barriers that surface specifically with older users and assistive technology. Documenting this limitation is honest; it would have been better to design around it.

Presenting the final redesign and accessibility recommendations to Our Greenway team and course cohort.

The Challenge

“The website is not attracting people who want to invest in us.”

“The bigger priority is to help people find information easily and help them learn about the organization.”

Front page still reflects an old focus (Northwest Toronto), which no longer matches their actual scope.

Word from the stakeholders

The organization had grown citywide. The website hadn't.

Our Greenway started as a Northwest Toronto LRT advocacy group. By 2026, it was running international conferences, publishing mobility research, and operating community programs across Toronto. The website still introduced the organization as a neighbourhood initiative, and its navigation still reflected the priorities of 2019.

01
Programs were buried and hard to find

Active programs like Cycling Without Age sat two clicks deep inside "Our Work," a dropdown that listed all 10 sub-items at once, creating a wall of text before any real navigation happened.

02
"Events" had no home on the website

There was no Events section. Ride registration, conference info, and community programming were fragmented across individual program pages with no clear path to sign up.

03
Donating felt like hitting an error

The donate button redirected to York University with no explanation. Multiple usability participants assumed they'd broken something and abandoned the flow.

04
Research work was invisible

10+ reports and publications were buried inside the "Our Work" dropdown — no dedicated hub, no filtering, no way to browse. The content existed; users just couldn't reach it.

original homepage of the website

The Research

Five methods, each answering a different question

We ran five methods because each one could answer something the others couldn't.

Competitive Analysis

Deep comparison against Evergreen (client-specified) and WindReach — Canadian non-profits with comparable multi-program, multi-audience sites.

Content Audit

ScreamingFrog technical crawl plus manual WCAG 2.1 review. 19 issues surfaced across four priority levels — 3 of them critical.

Desk Research

Full map of navigation structure, page hierarchy, labeling consistency, click depth, and cross-linking gaps.

Stakeholder Interviews · 3


Teams calls with the Treasurer (SI1), Operations Coordinator (SI2), and CEO (SI3). Our goal was to understand organizational constraints before writing a single recommendation.

Open Card Sort · 5 Participants

18 real content cards on UXtweak. Participants freely grouped and named their own categories — revealing how they actually organized the content, without being led by existing nav labels.

Usability Testing · 6 Participants

Task-based sessions on the live site. We recruited independently rather than accepting the client's offer to supply participants from their own contact list.

What We Found

The ScreamingFrog crawl and manual WCAG 2.1 review surfaced 19 issues across four priority levels. The three critical findings were:

01
Broken Publications navigation link

Clicking Publications in the navbar did nothing. The 10+ years of research weren't shown in a consolidated way.

02
Donation flow actively harming conversion

The donate button landed users on an intermediate page with multiple links and an unreadable gif before any payment option appeared. Users didn't know where they were or what to do. The redirect to York University with no explanation led participants in usability testing assume they'd hit a phishing page.

03
Multiple H1 tags and broken keyboard navigation

Having multiple H1 headings breaks screen reader hierarchy entirely, and keyboard navigation wasn't fully supported across interactive elements, meaning users who couldn't use a mouse were blocked from core site functionality.

These were barriers affecting every visitor using assistive technology and every donor trying to give.

What the card sort told us

I observed that the users weren't cruising through the sort. They were working hard to figure out what each card meant. That cognitive effort is a direct symptom of content labels that don't communicate.

The clustering result, though, was unambiguous. Without any prompting, all five participants divided 18 content cards into exactly two groups, and never crossed between them. Cards within each cluster scored 80–100% similarity. Cross-cluster pairs: 0%

Cluster A — 100% agreement

Who we are & how to help

Our Plan · Our Team · Our Supporters · Contact Us · Join Us · Donate · Sign up for updates · Social Media

Users named these: "Who we are," "How to help us," "Actions"

Cluster B — 80–100% agreement

Programs, research & impact

Cycling Without Age · NACBC · Flightpath · The Greenway Effect · Micromobility · Dispatches · E-Cargo Roadshow

Named: "Research/Products," "Impacts" — or left unnamed entirely
What Usability Tests added

The usability test confirmed that the participants struggled most with two tasks.

  1. Finding event registration — It didn't have a coherent destination anywhere on the site.

  2. Completing a donation — The York University redirect, appearing without context, caused visible confusion. Several participants paused, read the URL bar, looked uncertain, and in two cases started to close the tab before continuing.

When I go to this page, it shows York University — it might make me feel it's "a phishing website.

- UT1 (While completing a donation related task)

I did not understand the website. It is complicated to navigate — there's no clear mission, vision, or experience of what we have done.

- Internal Stakeholders

It's unfortunate that events doesn't have its own tab.

- UT3 (while after completing the task to find an event)

words from Usability Test Participant

What participants responded to positively was the colorful illustrations and organized content blocks on the homepage. This led us to conclude that

the problem wasn't the design but the structure.

Problems identified in the current IA during usability tests

Design Decisions

  1. Restructured the navigation

  • 4/6 usability participants couldn't locate Programs conducted by OurGreenway, so we introduced it at the top level.

  • "Our Work" was overloaded - it held programs, publications, and research.

  • Participants were unsure whether "Join Us" meant events, membership, volunteering, or donating.

  • Removed "Brand" from the public navigation

after
  1. A renewed Footer for better Navigation
BEFORE

For users who scrolled past the main nav or landed mid-page, there was no secondary path to key content. The redesigned footer mirrors the new top-level navigation structure, giving users a full secondary map of the site — Programs, Research, Events, Get Involved — from any point on the page. This is particularly important for accessibility: users relying on keyboard navigation or screen readers often navigate via the footer rather than the top nav.

after
  1. Explained the York University donation redirect

Usability testing showed the York University redirect caused visible confusion and abandonment. The obvious recommendation was "fix the redirect." But the stakeholder interview revealed that York University is Our Greenway's primary research partner and processes donations as a registered Canadian charity, changing the infrastructure would require renegotiating a core organizational partnership.

So the recommendation changed: rather than fixing the redirect, explain it before it happens. A short note on the donate page — naming York University, describing the relationship, and confirming the redirect is intentional — resolves the confusion without touching infrastructure.

BEFORE
after
  1. Built a dedicated Research hub as a top-level tab

Publications and research reports were previously buried in the "Our Work" dropdown, listed by individual title with no way to browse or filter. The Publications nav link was broken entirely. The redesign creates a standalone Research page with all content in one place, filter and sort controls, and a clear entry point from the top nav.

after

Learnings

On participant recruitment

The organization naturally wanted to hear from people who already engaged with their work. But "people who already know the site" is not the same as "people who need to find their way around the site." Pushing back on the client's offer to supply usability participants was the right call, the navigation failures we found would have been invisible to a familiar audience.

Define success criteria before execution, not after

The SMART criteria we agreed with the client at the end of discovery gave the execution phase something to design toward — and give the post-launch evaluation something to measure against. Without a baseline and a target, there's no way to know if the redesign actually worked.

What worked

Running stakeholder interviews before writing recommendations. The York University donation flow looked like broken UX from the outside. The interviews revealed it as an organizational constraint, which meant the right solution was a content fix, not a technical one. That shift only happens when you understand the constraint first.

What I'd do differently

Recruit more age-diverse usability participants earlier. Testing with a younger-skewing recruited sample meant we caught navigation failures but may have missed accessibility barriers that surface specifically with older users and assistive technology. Documenting this limitation is honest; it would have been better to design around it.

Presenting the final redesign and accessibility recommendations to Our Greenway team and course cohort.

The Challenge

“The website is not attracting people who want to invest in us.”

“The bigger priority is to help people find information easily and help them learn about the organization.”

Front page still reflects an old focus (Northwest Toronto), which no longer matches their actual scope.

Word from the stakeholders

The organization had grown citywide. The website hadn't.

Our Greenway started as a Northwest Toronto LRT advocacy group. By 2026, it was running international conferences, publishing mobility research, and operating community programs across Toronto. The website still introduced the organization as a neighbourhood initiative, and its navigation still reflected the priorities of 2019.

01
Programs were buried and hard to find

Active programs like Cycling Without Age sat two clicks deep inside "Our Work," a dropdown that listed all 10 sub-items at once, creating a wall of text before any real navigation happened.

02
"Events" had no home on the website

There was no Events section. Ride registration, conference info, and community programming were fragmented across individual program pages with no clear path to sign up.

03
Donating felt like hitting an error

The donate button redirected to York University with no explanation. Multiple usability participants assumed they'd broken something and abandoned the flow.

04
Research work was invisible

10+ reports and publications were buried inside the "Our Work" dropdown — no dedicated hub, no filtering, no way to browse. The content existed; users just couldn't reach it.

original homepage of the website

The Research

Five methods, each answering a different question

We ran five methods because each one could answer something the others couldn't.

Competitive Analysis

Deep comparison against Evergreen (client-specified) and WindReach — Canadian non-profits with comparable multi-program, multi-audience sites.

Content Audit

ScreamingFrog technical crawl plus manual WCAG 2.1 review. 19 issues surfaced across four priority levels — 3 of them critical.

Desk Research

Full map of navigation structure, page hierarchy, labeling consistency, click depth, and cross-linking gaps.

Stakeholder Interviews · 3


Teams calls with the Treasurer (SI1), Operations Coordinator (SI2), and CEO (SI3). Our goal was to understand organizational constraints before writing a single recommendation.

Open Card Sort · 5 Participants

18 real content cards on UXtweak. Participants freely grouped and named their own categories — revealing how they actually organized the content, without being led by existing nav labels.

Usability Testing · 6 Participants

Task-based sessions on the live site. We recruited independently rather than accepting the client's offer to supply participants from their own contact list.

What We Found

The ScreamingFrog crawl and manual WCAG 2.1 review surfaced 19 issues across four priority levels. The three critical findings were:

01
Broken Publications navigation link

Clicking Publications in the navbar did nothing. The 10+ years of research weren't shown in a consolidated way.

02
Donation flow actively harming conversion

The donate button landed users on an intermediate page with multiple links and an unreadable gif before any payment option appeared. Users didn't know where they were or what to do. The redirect to York University with no explanation led participants in usability testing assume they'd hit a phishing page.

03
Multiple H1 tags and broken keyboard navigation

Having multiple H1 headings breaks screen reader hierarchy entirely, and keyboard navigation wasn't fully supported across interactive elements, meaning users who couldn't use a mouse were blocked from core site functionality.

These were barriers affecting every visitor using assistive technology and every donor trying to give.

What the card sort told us

I observed that the users weren't cruising through the sort. They were working hard to figure out what each card meant. That cognitive effort is a direct symptom of content labels that don't communicate.

The clustering result, though, was unambiguous. Without any prompting, all five participants divided 18 content cards into exactly two groups, and never crossed between them. Cards within each cluster scored 80–100% similarity. Cross-cluster pairs: 0%

Cluster A — 100% agreement

Who we are & how to help

Our Plan · Our Team · Our Supporters · Contact Us · Join Us · Donate · Sign up for updates · Social Media

Users named these: "Who we are," "How to help us," "Actions"

Cluster B — 80–100% agreement

Programs, research & impact

Cycling Without Age · NACBC · Flightpath · The Greenway Effect · Micromobility · Dispatches · E-Cargo Roadshow

Named: "Research/Products," "Impacts" — or left unnamed entirely
What Usability Tests added

The usability test confirmed that the participants struggled most with two tasks.

  1. Finding event registration — It didn't have a coherent destination anywhere on the site.

  2. Completing a donation — The York University redirect, appearing without context, caused visible confusion. Several participants paused, read the URL bar, looked uncertain, and in two cases started to close the tab before continuing.

When I go to this page, it shows York University — it might make me feel it's "a phishing website.

- UT1 (While completing a donation related task)

I did not understand the website. It is complicated to navigate — there's no clear mission, vision, or experience of what we have done.

- Internal Stakeholders

It's unfortunate that events doesn't have its own tab.

- UT3 (while after completing the task to find an event)

words from Usability Test Participant

What participants responded to positively was the colorful illustrations and organized content blocks on the homepage. This led us to conclude that

the problem wasn't the design but the structure.

Problems identified in the current IA during usability tests

Design Decisions

  1. Restructured the navigation

  • 4/6 usability participants couldn't locate Programs conducted by OurGreenway, so we introduced it at the top level.

  • "Our Work" was overloaded - it held programs, publications, and research.

  • Participants were unsure whether "Join Us" meant events, membership, volunteering, or donating.

  • Removed "Brand" from the public navigation

after
  1. A renewed Footer for better Navigation
BEFORE

For users who scrolled past the main nav or landed mid-page, there was no secondary path to key content. The redesigned footer mirrors the new top-level navigation structure, giving users a full secondary map of the site — Programs, Research, Events, Get Involved — from any point on the page. This is particularly important for accessibility: users relying on keyboard navigation or screen readers often navigate via the footer rather than the top nav.

after
  1. Explained the York University donation redirect

Usability testing showed the York University redirect caused visible confusion and abandonment. The obvious recommendation was "fix the redirect." But the stakeholder interview revealed that York University is Our Greenway's primary research partner and processes donations as a registered Canadian charity, changing the infrastructure would require renegotiating a core organizational partnership.

So the recommendation changed: rather than fixing the redirect, explain it before it happens. A short note on the donate page — naming York University, describing the relationship, and confirming the redirect is intentional — resolves the confusion without touching infrastructure.

BEFORE
after
  1. Built a dedicated Research hub as a top-level tab

Publications and research reports were previously buried in the "Our Work" dropdown, listed by individual title with no way to browse or filter. The Publications nav link was broken entirely. The redesign creates a standalone Research page with all content in one place, filter and sort controls, and a clear entry point from the top nav.

after

Learnings

On participant recruitment

The organization naturally wanted to hear from people who already engaged with their work. But "people who already know the site" is not the same as "people who need to find their way around the site." Pushing back on the client's offer to supply usability participants was the right call, the navigation failures we found would have been invisible to a familiar audience.

Define success criteria before execution, not after

The SMART criteria we agreed with the client at the end of discovery gave the execution phase something to design toward — and give the post-launch evaluation something to measure against. Without a baseline and a target, there's no way to know if the redesign actually worked.

What worked

Running stakeholder interviews before writing recommendations. The York University donation flow looked like broken UX from the outside. The interviews revealed it as an organizational constraint, which meant the right solution was a content fix, not a technical one. That shift only happens when you understand the constraint first.

What I'd do differently

Recruit more age-diverse usability participants earlier. Testing with a younger-skewing recruited sample meant we caught navigation failures but may have missed accessibility barriers that surface specifically with older users and assistive technology. Documenting this limitation is honest; it would have been better to design around it.

Presenting the final redesign and accessibility recommendations to Our Greenway team and course cohort.
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Got a design problem worth solving, or want to talk shop? I'd love to connect.

Send me a hello!

Email

ux.asthadhami@gmail.com

LinkedIn

aasthadhami

Instagram

Medium


Got a design problem worth solving, or want to talk shop? I'd love to connect.

Send me a hello!

Email

ux.asthadhami@gmail.com

LinkedIn

aasthadhami

Instagram

Medium


Got a design problem worth solving, or want to talk shop? I'd love to connect.

Send me a hello!

Email

ux.asthadhami@gmail.com

LinkedIn

aasthadhami

Instagram

Medium

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2026