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Osceola County, just south of Orlando, is one of the fastest--growing counties in Florida. Urban and suburban growth are accelerating, but the county remains home to healthy ecosystems and bountiful agriculture.
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) engaged GreenInfo to design and build the Osceola Greenprint to help ensure human and natural communities can continue to grow alongside each other. The Osceola Greenprint is a free, user-friendly web-based tool designed to help planners, developers, policymakers, and community leaders make informed decisions about land use and development in Osceola County. The Greenprint is available in English and Spanish.
Design process
We began the project with a design research effort, including a survey and interviews with key users in government, consultancies, and nonprofit organizations that work in the county. We engaged with both local groups and statewide organizations that have a special interest in the county, especially around wildlife connectivity.
Building on the local knowledge of the people we interviewed, we developed a set of personas to help guide our work. We also created a list of priority data layers—from land use to wildlife observations to hurricane risk—and important feature requirements, which formed the foundation for interface design, copywriting, and data development.
The interface design synthesized our design research findings with TNC’s branding and web standards to create a feature-rich, easy-to-use interface that fully aligns with the larger universe of TNC’s web identity.
Later in the process, we conducted a round of usability testing, with a mix of group sessions and one-on-one interviews in English and Spanish. This work proved especially valuable in making the tool as easy to use as possible.
Technical
We worked closely with TNC Florida staff to pull together relevant data and prepare it for use on the website.
Alongside data development, we built the overall application in Wordpress, based on TNC’s IT and security requirements. We took advantage of various widely used Wordpress plugins to customize content types and provide custom translation into Spanish, with expert translation provided by a separate firm hired by TNC.
Finally, we brought the spatial data into an open source API powered by the Django application framework, which provides dynamic data for reporting, as well as visible map layers. For some highly dynamic data, such as observations from iNaturalist and building permits from the county, we developed scripts to refresh the data on a weekly basis.
Results: The application launched successfully in fall 2024, with highlights on the Nature Conservancy’s main website and coverage from the local NPR affiliate. The true impact of the project will unfold over time as people in Osceola County use it to guide various planning processes in the years to come.
Focus: Conservation, Economic Development, Environment, Social Justice/Equity
Services: Interactive Solutions, GIS Services, Data, Applications Development, Web Mapping, Website Design, Design Research
Project Years: 2024