Discover
Rescuing one animal may not change the world, but for that animal, their world is changed forever.
The interest in pet adoption has boomed during the pandemic, and numerous information inquiry phone calls are coming into the rescue center every day.
A friend of mine also adopted a cat from a local shelter. The tedious process and instructions almost had her gave up the adoption. We wanted to help these animals find their love and forever home soon. That’s why we are starting this volunteer project initially.
The problem: from the local pet rescue center, we learned that the truth is - about 60% of phone calls are asking for information like instructions that are on their website. No one takes time to go through the adoption instructions they had on the website.
The goal: To reduce unnecessary support inquires by design a intuitive and user-friendly website so that users can easily find the information they need easily.
The timeline: 3 months.
Tool used: Figma & Adobe AI for design, Optimalsort for card sorting, Zoom for meeting
We had a Zoom meeting with the board member of the YVPR rescue center, and we asked open-ended questions like:
What do you think are some current problems with the website?
What made you look into researching redesigning it?
We then had three one on one interviews with three volunteers from YVPR. Volunteers are both happy and upset about the increased phone inquires. They are pleased because animals are getting adopted. On the other hand, they are pretty upset because they missed the phone calls due to limited availability.
“All volunteers have full time job. As much as we want to
help everybody. Our time is limited.”
Interviewee during our one-one-one session
“Our website is full of text and applications, users feel that
the website is so complicated and they could adopt a child
with the current design.”
Interviewee during our one-one-one session
We ran a survey, preliminary user testing, interviews with actual users of the website.
Define
We did a site audit and a comparative analysis with other pet rescue websites. We found that many pages have outdated designs - and from comparative analysis, we compared current the site structure and menu system to learn what's doing well and what's doing not well to other pet rescue sites.
To better understand the key tasks of our target users, we created the task matrix for the most common tasks that each of the user groups needs to complete when they use the YVPR website. We use this matrix and combine with user interviews to created persona. This matrix also help us better understand if the existing content satisfies user needs and what content could go on the homepage.
With the information in hand and combining user research learning, we created four personas to help us align our design better to meet their persona’s goals. These four personas are Adopter, pet relocator, volunteer, donator. We later used these personas when designing to ensure that our solution looped back to the needs and goals outlined in them.
Next, I created journeys for these four categories with the instructions I found on the website.
For the next step, we collected a total of thirty customer support data from stakeholders. I was able to group them into four categories: adoption, surrender lost & found, Item donation, others. I was able to clearly mark data points on the user journey map and actually find out which step the problem occurs the most and which step people needed help the most.
Carry on with the goal of understanding the user’s mental models and find out ideal navigation for users. We then conducted the 11 cards sorting with the tool OptimalSort. We narrowed down from 47 content items into 6 main categories and 14 subcategories.
With the result that we learned from card sorting and Competitive analysis, we created the information architecture for the new website that meets users' expectations. Later we designed new site navigation based on this information architecture.
Develop
We first created a paper prototype and we tested inside the team. With insights we move on the mid- fide prototype for first round.
We then conducted 10 rounds of usability testing. There are still some improvements. But the overall result was beyond our expectations. Participants successfully completed all key tasks! What's better? Our System Usability Scale score went from 48 to 77! With the new testing insights, we came out with the final high fidelity prototype and hand it to the developers.
The style guidelines I created to keep design consistency For design values, we sent a branding survey based on Nielsen Norman Group's tone of voice dimension guide line to our stakeholders to make the feel and the look of the final design is what they need. We were able to collect eight response from the management board.
