Cherokee Humane
Society Redesign
My Role
UX Designer
User Researcher
Tools Used
Figma
FigJam
Google Suite
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Team Members
Auriel
Eli
Juliette
Marin
The Problem
The Cherokee Humane Society website was designed to give the organization an initial online presence. We have observed that the organization’s key information isn’t easily found, which is causing lower interactions with the shelter and therefore fewer adoptions.
The Solution
A completely redesigned and improved website geared towards attracting more traffic and booting public interactions and adoptions.
The User
Animal lovers looking to adopt and/or donate to locate animal shelters
The Goal
To gather information and insight into how people who adopt pets navigate the Cherokee Humane Society website and what they are looking for when they adopt an animal and/or donate to the society.
RESEARCH
Before we began our research, we started out with an initial objective and hypothesis. By doing so, we were given a foundation and basic directional guide in how to approach our users during our research phase to better comprehend what their needs were in regard to the website.
Objective: To gather information and insight into how people who adopt pets navigate the Cherokee Humane Society website and what they are looking for when they adopt an animal and/or donate to the society
Hypothesis: There are many different places someone can acquire a pet from and we want to increase local awareness for pet adoption from a shelter. By redesigning the homepage and adoption page we will increase traffic to and adoptions to the Cherokee Humane Society website.
We created a proto-persona based on our assumptions of the demographics who were most likely to adopt and/or donate to an animal shelter. This proto-persona was based on our own experiences as well as thinking about the demographics that would most likely come to an animal shelter rather than going to a breeder.
In our interviewing process, we sent 5 participating users through the Cherokee County Humane Society, gathering their initial impressions of the site while giving them two main tasks to accomplish during the interview: adopting a pet and making a donation. We felt that this was the main foot traffic to occur when one comes to the charity’s site. From these interviews, we found these four points to be user Major Pain Points consistent in each interview:
Lack of Intuitive Website Navigation
Unclear Information about Charity
Limited Pet Search Filters
Incorrect Button Navigation
DEFINITION
With our interviews and research, we were able to create a user persona that data driven. Having a data-driven persona would be the most effective in our research. It gives us as designers a better insight into our users and helps us create more user-efficient designs that we can build upon in order to create the best user experience possible.
We then created an I Like, I Wish, What if and User Journey map to get a better understanding of our users needs as well as how they relate to the business:
By using these two forms of research, we could better understand the user’s perspective, motivations, and experience. This helped in gaining empathy and develop user-centered products. From these two research guides, we went on to create a feature matrix. The goal was to understand and map out features that would be of the most benefit to the users. With the Cherokee Humane Society, their main objectives of their website were to give users the ability to adopt, donate, contribute to the non-profit. Our goal would be to streamline and prioritize those objectives as well enhance the users’ experience with those features on the site.
The Cherokee Humane Society website was difficult for users to navigate. The menus are in a handwritten font and too close together to tell which words go together as a menu item. There’s a lot of text on the homepage but other than running a thrift store, their mission isn’t clear. The links to donate to the charity are broken and there’s too many links to click through before you finally get to see what pets are up for adoption.
IDEATION
Through use of our affinity Diagram, our team collaborated to prioritize the features that we would change to improve the Cherokee Humane Society’s web and mobile experience. This proved beneficial in providing visual representations and deeper understanding of users’ needs, pain points and opportunities. By separating our users’ initial interview feedback into basic categories, we extracted insights from the collected data to generate ideas and design directions based on what users would want from a website.
From the use of a card sorting exercise, we created a new navigation sitemap while referencing the original one. With this reorganization, users will be able to navigate the site more easily, resulting in an increase in traffic flow to the website resulting in increased local awareness for pet adoption and donation through a shelter.
PROTOTYPING
Juliette and I tasked ourselves to create wireframes to better understand our new information architecture.
With the wireframe sketches as a guide, Marin and Eli created lo-fi prototypes of both the desktop and mobile versions of our site.
USABILITY TESTING
We needed to test our prototype with users to see if our changes to the charity’s site were influential and beneficial with potential users of the site. With our lo-fi prototype, we launched usability testing with four users to determine if our changes are valid. Once we completed our testing, we compiled together the notes, revised our affinity diagram, userflow, and priority matrix.
We executed the changes suggested by our user, such as adjusting our menu selection, including more transparency with where the money is going, and adjusting contrast and visibility with fonts. With those revisions, we felt confident in the presentation of our high fidelity prototype.
CONCLUSION
Some next steps with this site would be the inclusion of additional website feature:
Instant Donation on Site
Reserve time to visit pet
Adoption forms online
Search feature to “find your perfect pet friend” (Type of pet, sex, age, color, breed)
Foster a pet application online
Online volunteer applications for volunteers who are 16 and older
In conclusion, We learned that we had a group of people who were great at being individual contributors and also collaborators.
We were only able to meet a couple of times as a whole group so we used Slack and Trello to communicate and manage the project deliverables.
While we couldn’t speak with a representative from the Cherokee Humane Society, we hope to share our redesign with them in the future.