"Simplicity is so hard to do right. These guys nailed it and at the same time created utility through experience." —juror Mathew Ranauro
"The opening alone says it all: picturesque, friendly, community-oriented. The site does a fantastic job of positioning the viewer one step closer to the park environments. And the series of 'placemat' navigation pages is refreshing." —juror Hilary Read
Overview: Most of the traffic to this site was driven by an extensive broadcast campaign of the same "This Is Your Land" theme that ran during the Ken Burns series The National Parks: America's Best Idea on PBS. It presents an experiential and social environment for users to learn more about America's treasured park system but also functions importantly as a transactional center for collecting e-mail addresses and donations. It's a visual, grid-based catalog of information that allows users to sort through an extensive database of information by image and to leave comments about personal National Park experiences and to tag the locations of parks they've visited.
• The project was completed in four very short weeks.
• The interface is focused around stunning Flickr-sourced imagery and the emotional context of the Ken Burns documentary series.
• Facebook Connect allows users to easily provide a profile image and other personal information for display on the site.
Comments by Nathan Kurach and Ryan Harms:
Was the topic/subject of the project a new one for you? "We've produced a number of content aggregators over the past year, so the theory underlying the site framework wasn't new to us. However, we hadn't made a progressive site of this nature for so diverse an audience or for so great a volume of users. In addition to implementing elegant resolution scaling to accommodate smaller screen sizes, we paid particular attention to the content organization and made the content submission process simple and straightforward."
How did time constraints affect your final solution? "With only three weeks to concept, build and go live, we were not able to build a complete enough platform that would allow us to institute a comprehensive engagement plan. We accomplished the goal of providing a valuable destination but we're looking forward to building onto it to guarantee sustained interest and activity."
