is a platform where users can adopt a pet, donate to shelters, find nearest shelter and take for a walk any dog.
My role:
UX designer leading the Pet Adoption website design
Responsibilities:
Conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, iterating on designs and responsive design.
I conducted user interviews, which I then turned into empathy maps to better understand the target user and their needs. I discovered that many target users wants to donate online or select a pet online, missing a lot of information. However, many pet adoption/shelter websites are overwhelming and confusing to navigate, which frustrated many target users. This caused a normally enjoyable experience to become challenging for them, defeating the purpose.
pain points
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Pet adoption website designs are often busy, which results in confusing navigation
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Pet shelter websites don’t provide an engaging browsing experience
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Most of the websites makes impossible to pay/donate online.
Users confused with the information they see
sitemap
Difficulty with website navigation was a primary pain point for users, so I used that knowledge to create a sitemap.
My goal here was to make strategic information architecture decisions that would improve overall website navigation. The structure I chose was designed to make things simple and easy.
Next, I sketched out paper wireframes for each screen in my app, keeping the user pain points about navigation, browsing, and checkout flow in mind.
The home screen paper wireframe variations to the right focus on optimizing the browsing experience for users.
Because Paws customers access the site on a variety of different devices, I started to work on designs for additional screen sizes to make sure the site would be fully responsive.
wireframes
Moving from paper to digital wireframes made it easy to understand how the redesign could help address user pain points and improve the user experience.
Prioritizing useful button locations and visual element placement on the home page was a key part of my strategy.
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Once at the checkout screen, users didn’t have a way to edit the amount and currency of donation
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Users needed to save their information somewhere.
Shelters that they donated to, favorite pets, etc
usability study
Based on the insights from the usability study, I made changes to improve the site’s checkout flow. One of the changes I made was adding the option to edit the amount of donation + selection of currency.
before usability study
after usability study
conclusion
conclusion
prototype
To make it easier for user to navigate through site and save favorite shelters/ pets or save information about previous donations, I’ve created “My Account” menu
before usability study
after usability study
Our target users shared that the design was intuitive to navigate through, more engaging with the images, and demonstrated a clear visual hierarchy.
what I learned:
I learned that even a small design change can have a huge impact on the user experience. The most important takeaway for me is to always focus on the real needs of the user when coming up with design ideas and solutions.
next steps:
Conduct follow-up usability testing on the new website
Identify any additional areas of need and ideate on new features