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Winner Story
GirlTrek Website by Teal Media
2022 Gold Award: Websites - Health
GirlTrek is a global movement of over 700 million Black women leveraging the historic legacy of walking and the power of self-care as a pathway to heal and transform lives. They teamed up with Teal Media to build a new website for the campaign which won a w3 Gold Award in 2022 for Websites – Health. We spoke with the team at Teal Media about the journey designing and developing this impactful website.
What inspired the creative direction for the GirlTrek website?
This movement is all about the power of Black women leveraging a historic legacy of walking as a pathway to heal and transform their lives, families and communities. This served as a catalyst to make sure we capture the authentic emotion and energy that each walk and JOURNEY of a personal practice entails. Capturing this spirit so that it could inspire other black women meant we needed to create an overall user experience that was warm, energized and unexpected. The design also needed to be simple enough to let the content shine – because GirlTrek has a diverse set of programs, each with its own strong visual and color, the design of the site needed to feel like a shell for the content and not be overly stylized. Lastly, we knew we wanted to pay homage to the civil rights inspired movement with usage of historical copy and images to serve as context and motivation.
Describe your biggest obstacle or challenge for this project.
The ideas for features and functionality are always bigger than project budgets! The combined GirlTrek and Teal teams had a lot of great ideas – especially for the interactive map of walks and events and for a logged-in user experience – but of course we needed to stick within the project budget. This is Teal’s job though – to work collaboratively with our clients to determine what the ‘biggest bang for the buck’ solution will be. As GirlTrek grows, and more and more people contribute to the movement, we hope that someday these new, powerful features can become a reality!
Which aspects of the team’s work are you most proud of?
Hands down the thoughtful user experience. We love how the site navigation follows the visitor’s journey with the movement – first they Start their Healing Journey, then they Practice Self Care; once they are in a good space with themselves, they can Connect to the Movement; and finally, if they want to deepen their engagement with GirlTrek, they can Train to Lead.
To emphasize this idea, we added little details such as the subtle animation you see on the homepage that walks you through the journey, complete with affirmations to keep the visitor encouraged to take the next step. And at the bottom of every subpage, we included a ‘Where to next’ panel that reminds visitors of where they are on their journey and what the next step is.