Design study · Tribal fisheries department · Idaho
Follow the run
A data portal concept for a tribal fisheries department, where the design problem is making scientific datasets usable without making them less true.
Concept only, built with sample data. Not an official Nez Perce Tribe Department of Fisheries Resources Management website.
- Data portal design
- Dataset search
- Accessible dashboards
- Monitoring map
- WCAG 2.2 AA
Nez Perce Tribe DFRM — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Fisheries management generates run, harvest, and escapement data that matters to biologists, co-managers, tribal members, and the public — four audiences with very different tolerance for a spreadsheet. Publishing raw datasets serves only the first group; publishing summary charts alone serves none of them well, because a chart without its underlying numbers cannot be checked, cited, or reused, and is invisible to a screen reader.
The approach
Every chart ships with a data-table twin. That single rule resolves the accessibility problem and the scientific-integrity problem at once: the visualization is for orientation, the table is the record, and neither is a downgrade of the other. Datasets are searchable rather than listed, dashboards run in the browser, a Snake River Basin monitoring map gives the numbers a geography, and a season-notice board carries the time-sensitive information that would otherwise be buried in a PDF. The visual world is salmon and basalt, drawn from the Columbia Basin itself. Conformance targets WCAG 2.2 AA — a superset of the 2.1 AA legal floor — rather than the minimum.
The result
Eight routes covering dataset search, dashboards, the basin map, and season notices, each chart paired with an accessible data table.
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