JUSFC/CULCON

The Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) and the U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON) are two organizations within an independent U.S federal agency. Their ultimate mission is to sustain the relationship between the U.S and Japan. Their websites originally had a text-heavy design which was not intuitive nor user-friendly. In short, it failed to advance their goal. Orpheus was entrusted with designing a site that would effectively communicate JUSFC’s and CULCON’s messages. Both websites adopt one design concept so as to promote the harmony between the two organizations.

One of the challenges of this project was the sheer volume of text required. Orpheus tackled this by creating multiple new pages, each of which contained information relevant to only one particular facet of the organizations. This high-level partitioning produces a framework that enables users to easily navigate to the information they need.

We then sub-divided the information on each page into multiple smaller parts, with each part getting its own section. This approach created a layout that allows users to quickly read and comprehend the text on a page. Compared to the old design, which consisted of few pages with a couple of very long paragraphs, the new design greatly enhanced the usability of the site.

Orpheus was also able to make the new site mobile-friendly. This is especially important for modern websites because the majority of web users are on mobile devices.

The final design was able to communicate everything about JUSFC/CULCON in a site that offered intuitive navigation and easy readability, on both desktop and mobile. JUSFC/CULCON was so happy with Orpheus’ work on this project that they have returned to us with multiple projects since then.