Making fisheries information easier to find
2025 · Fisheries and Oceans Canada · Website Redesign
Tools
Excel · Mural · Proven by Users · Figma
Timeline
September – December 2025
Team
4 students
Role
UX Researcher · Information Architect · Product Designer
Introduction
Fisheries and Oceans Canada manages a large amount of information for recreational fishers, industry professionals, researchers, and the public. Our team looked at how that information was organized and where users were getting lost.
Over the semester, we audited the existing website, studied how users grouped its content, tested the current navigation, and used those findings to redesign the site structure and key pages.
The original site covered everything from licences and regulations to aquatic species, habitats, research, and regional information, which made finding the right path difficult for users.
1
Site Audit
2
Card Sorting
3
Tree Testing
4
Redesign
The Problem
The DFO website contained useful information, but its structure made that information difficult to find. Broad categories, repeated pathways, and unclear labels often forced users to guess where content might be located.
Our inventory also revealed pages that appeared in multiple areas of the site, recursive links that sent users back to earlier sections, and a mix of administrative tasks and environmental information within the same navigation structure.
The main challenge became clear: the website’s organization did not always match the way users expected the information to be grouped.
Research & Redesign
We started with an open card sort to understand how people naturally grouped DFO content. A clear pattern appeared: participants generally separated species, habitats, and ecosystems from more practical content such as licensing, permits, and regulations. They also relied heavily on familiar keywords when deciding where information belonged.
We then tested two common tasks using the original site structure: finding information about an endangered aquatic species and renewing a fishing licence. The first round showed that users frequently entered similar-sounding sections and had difficulty identifying the correct path.
Based on these findings, we reorganized the website around five clearer top-level categories:
Services · Licensing · Species & Habitat · Programs & Initiatives · Contact Offices
We also introduced clearer local navigation, contextual links, and filtered search options to reduce the number of pages users had to work through.
Outcome
The revised tree test showed that the new structure made key tasks easier to complete.
For the endangered-species task, success increased from 20% to 40%. The licensing task showed the biggest improvement, increasing from 11.1% to 66.7%, while the average completion time dropped from 63.8 seconds to 12 seconds.
Our final proposal translated those findings into a redesigned sitemap and wireframes with clearer global navigation, dedicated licensing and environmental sections, contextual navigation, and more focused search tools.
This project showed me how much information architecture can influence whether a website feels simple or overwhelming. The biggest takeaway for me was learning to connect research findings directly to design decisions instead of reorganizing content based only on what seemed logical to us.
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