NOAA Fisheries

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries, also known as the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), is a federal agency responsible for the stewardship of the nation’s ocean resources and their habitat. Their services include: conservation and management of U.S. waters to promote prevention of overfishing, declining species, and degraded habitats. NOAA Fisheries manages five coastal regions broken down by department, fisheries management, science centers, and labs. Each office ran their own independent site creating inconsistency and overlap in content and design as each isolated digital property. Mobomo partnered with NOAA Fisheries to assist in restructuring and redesigning their digital presence. Merging all their core web properties into one Drupal site. Allowing users to go to one destination to find and discover information they need. Focusing on improving content efficiency, design consistency, and unifying NOAA Fisheries voice. Within one year we launched the framework for their next generation site. The NOAA Fisheries site is more than a conveyor of marine life information and research. It offers a large variety of information; from summaries of upcoming rules, permits, funding opportunities, to various types of helpful resources. Each section had its own challenges for the Mobomo team to learn and develop automated solutions around. The goal was to automate and simplify the content for users to locate, as well as for editors to post and manage. Mobomo followed a user-centered approach that consisted of discovery, research, design, and validation phases to deliver a comprehensive, documented and validated user-centered design and information architecture that unified the 16 previously disparate web properties into one site.