Spore-tacular Rebirth: New York Mycological Society Gets a Website Makeover!

Dear Mycologists,

For the past year, I have been working behind the scenes to revamp the New York Mycological Society’s website judiciously. The journey began back in late December and early January of 2022/2023, when the New York Mycological Society was approached by professor Hakan Hachem, of Pratt Studio, to help redesign our website (probono) as part of his UX/UI curriculum.

There were a few in person sessions with Prof. Hachem and his students at campus, where I was able to speak to the mission of New York Mycological Society and articulate our values and who we are. With many conversations and iterations, they were able to completely revamp our website’s information architecture. Combined with our conversations, the students also performed user studies, involving a few volunteers from our club. Together they were able to greatly improve the user experience.

With the architecture and layout complete, the onus for re-building our website fell squarely on my shoulders for which I volunteered many hours and time to developing and building. I would like to thank Sigrid Jakob, who was instrumental, for providing much of the content, as well as validating and testing the website alongside me. This past Tuesday, and a few weeks ahead of our 2nd Annual Fungus Festival the New York Mycological Society’s new website was launched:

There are a bunch of new features, sections and content on our new website which we hope you will all enjoy and make use of. We also believe that you will all find the user experience much cleaner and easier to navigate! We now have a site wide search bar at the top of the page, and are actively working on making the website 100% responsive. I would like to highlight a few of the enhancements below. In order for you to experience many of the new features, you will all first have to:

Login

** Please note, that everyone’s password was wiped out, to maintain their privacy**

All current  members will have to reset their new password. Passwords were not ported over to our new website for your privacy. You may easily set a new password by either clicking the “forgot password” link on the join page or visiting the forgot password page directly:

Events

We have a few views that you may use when looking for events:

• • List view
  • Month view
  • Photo view
• Map view (work in progress)

All of these views will also have the event details protected behind your login. We also have some new and exciting features in our event details sidebar:

• Calendar event subscriptions
  • You may now add an event to your mobile device calendar or desktop client
• Zoom meeting/link information and click to join a call
  • You may now launch the lecture, ID meeting or other from the event page
• Organizer contact information
  • Clear communication on who is leading the event and how to contact them
• Map with meetup point

Account

Your account page also received an overhaul, where you will find the Renew button on the Membership tab that will now take you to a Renew page where you may Renew and extend your membership at any time.

You will also find a new Email Management tab. Here you will be able to decide on the content you want to receive in a soon to be new email service that we are currently working on and testing behind the scenes.

Resources

Our resource section of the website also got a massive overhaul. We now post our legacy archived newsletters for you to download and view and we will be continuously adding to them.

We also showcase and highlight recent observations from our iNaturalist projects that I custom built using the iNaturalist API for our website!

For those who enjoy cooking, we completely revamped Andrew Cannon’s Grocery Store list complete with maps and addresses of where you may purchase fungi in NYC. Keep an eye on this space as I am sure he will be adding more locations soon.

Get Involved

All of our partners details may be found here, including their social media handles and website information as well as a short bio.

We also have a comprehensive FAQ section and a form for you to use to get in touch with us about volunteering!

About

We have added a nice timeline of our club history and milestone events. You may easily contact each of our clubs officers on our team page and interact with them on their social media handles

As with any new website launch, we do expect some bugs, so please reach out and let us know if you find any and report a bug. We also want you to provide us with feedback and we would love to hear from our members directly!

Legal

Prior to, our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy were nearly impossible to find. Now they are clearly hyperlinked on both the Join & Renew page.

Future plans

• • Merchandise
    • We all know how much you all loved our Fungus Festival shirts last year and our I🍄NY Totes. We plan to work on a fully functional webstore that will be full of merchandise for you to purchase at any time!
  • Walk lists
    • Gone, but not forgotten. This section of our website will be back and better than ever! We didn’t have the time to overhaul this section of our previous website and want to make sure we give it the TLC it deserves!
  •  Garylincoff
    • This is also not forgotten and will be back soon!
  •  Imagery
    • All images on our website are images taken by members who have given us permission to use them on our website. The website I built belongs to all of us. We encourage our members to send us photos that we may use. In the future.
    • I would like to thank the following folks for allowing us use of their imagery:
      • Tom Bigelow
      • Blacki Migliozzi
      • Zihao Wang

Regards,

– Elan Trybuch, Secretary of the New York Mycological Society 🍄