Not only is this a fun project to work on, but we’re also excited that we’re in the background of co-developing the Gefahrenzonenplanung platform (GZP).
GZP is Austria is becoming the leading hazard zone planning education platform, co-developed with the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Regions, and Water Management.
This project is right up to our alley; bringing expertise in water management, education, and UX design ensures complex knowledge is structured into an accessible resource. We burn for future-proof approaches to river management and are convinced that GZP has all it takes.
Having a background in water management and environmental sciences helped us understand the challenges our potential users might face and that is why we tailor content to real-world questions, continuously refining it based on user needs.
With a new 3-year collaboration, we’re looking forward to expanding the knowledge base’ content into snow dynamics and avalanches—strengthening GZP’s role as the go-to resource for resilient communities.
Hazard Zone Planning Education Platform on its own sounds like a mouthful. It comprises of some very technical and hard-to-understand content. That’s why we focused on transforming these complex concepts into easily understandable and engaging content.
Understanding that younger generations and people with limited water management background are required to take informed water-management decisions, this was a motivation to break through the barrier of the curse of knowledge.
The whole platform follows a ‘Question-Answer’ logic that guides the learners from the basic knowledge and concepts to the more advanced, yet explained in a simple language.
Focus on creating a user-friendly and intuitive platform design, ensuring that learners can easily navigate, search for content, and access information with minimal effort across multiple varying levels of expertise. That’s why every chapter of the content is tightly linked to the GZP glossary that provides short, but to the point explanations of terminology and concepts.
We put user search intent to the fore and structured the platform using a ‘Question-Answer’ approach. What that means is that we conducted an indepth SEO analysis to identify real-life questions and FAQs, which guided us with organising the content of the platform.
We started from scratch. We developed the whole platform on WordPress as this allows for cost-effective solutions to further manage the platform as well as easy usability for those helping us manage the platform.
As a website serving public purposes, we focused on accessibility of the platform; that means not only ensuring the platform is navigable for the visually impaired but also for people with other needs.
For this project, we were really happy to partner up with Dorothée Post, a visual environmental science communicator, who creates all visual components, illustrations and graphic design of the GZP platform.