Live Love Animal Rescue is a local organization dedicated to their mission of being the safeguard for animals that can't be adopted by the general public. They rely on their foster volunteers and generous donations from animal lovers to support and rehabilitate all pups that come into their care. To help the organization, we ultimately wanted to redesign the website to help them increase the number of foster applicants.
Timeline: 3 weeks
My Role: UX Research, Wireframing, Prototyping
Scope: focused on improving the fostering user flow.
The founder indicated that one of main issues the rescue is facing is a lack of foster applicants. We needed to understand why this was the case, and how might we encourage more.
We believe that bringing transparency about the expectation, procedure, and support provided to foster volunteers will result in an increase in foster applications.
.png)
Through the course of our research, we found that the lack of foster applicants came from the absence of structure and hierarchy in the website’s navigation and page layouts. Our solution directly addresses these issues by reorganizing the navigation, chunking and adding direction to the content, and adding a “Fostering 101” page to the fostering user flow.
Our research started with trying to gain a sense of what currently works and what the friction points are while using the site. We tested for three main objectives:
The data we gather from these initial tests synthesized into categories. We found the following categories to be the biggest friction points.
We got in touch with Emily Peterson, the founder of Live Love Animal Rescue, who was more that thrilled about our project and eager to learn how we might improve their website. During our stakeholder interview, we learned about the goals of the organization and the primary function of the website. the following insights set the direction for our redesign.
mission: to safeguard animals that can’t be adopted by the general public.
Having now focused the scope of our redesign to the fostering pages of the website, we ran another set of usability test and interviews.
After synthesizing the data we collected from the interview we came to the following insights that served as the three main issues we would address in our redesign.
To identify the specific usability issues, we redlined the main pages involved in the fostering user flow.
For the scope of this design challenge, we would limit our redesign to the home page, and the pages related to how a new user would apply to be a foster. From our user insights, we decided to prioritize three focus areas.
The first issue we tackled was navigation. After a card sort exercise, we had a sitemap that simplified the navigation and clearly communicated the main actions a user can take on the website. To bring more transparency to the fostering process we decided to add a “Fostering 101” page that would answer any questions a new foster volunteer might have.
.png)
Once navigation had been reorganized, we finalized a user flow that clearly define how a prospective foster volunteer might go about researching how to foster with Live Love Animal Rescue.
While originally, a design flourish, the motif of “carrots” emerged in our design during the wireframing stages. However, we soon found that they also added direction and hierarchy to the flow of our pages.
As with any good design process, we not only consulted users, but also our fellow cohorts for feedback on our wireframed design. Despite the direction and chunking we have incorporated into the Fostering 101 page, it was still too much information being presented at one time.
We realized that the website could also be more visually engaging so we gave the UI a visual lift with modern graphic elements and text fonts, while referencing the original style guide to stay true to their brand.
After some a round of iterations, we finalized our desktop prototype. Based on the feedback we received, we redesigned the “Fostering 101” page to utilize accordion components to limit and chunk the amount of information being presented to the user at any one time.
Through the design phase, a team member developed our mobile prototype in conjunction with our desktop prototype. Doing so encouraged discussion about features across device platforms, which lead us to a more robust design overall.
At the tail-end of our design process, we managed to squeeze in some validation testing with a few usability testers who were familiar with the original site. Ultimately, we found that our design was much easier for users to find and understand the basic requirements for fostering with Live Love Animal Rescue. People were able to navigate and identify key information in a fraction of the time it took on the original website.
At the conclusion of this website redesign, we presented our final prototype to Emily, the founder of Live Love Animal Rescue, including details of areas that could be improved and how we addressed them throughout the course of our redesign process. Working with a local non-profit organiation was a very rewarding experience. Despite a bit of a rough start, we enjoyed the challenge of building structure and hierarchy to the website to imrpove the experience of anyone interested in fostering with Live Love Animal Rescue.
