Pepper Foundation Redesign
The Brief
Understanding the problems, goals & scope definition
Problem: Animal lovers who plan to provide a loving home to elderly or special-needs pets, need an organized website with enhanced transparency about each animal's specific needs/ responsibilities that taking care of them entails, in turn allowing owners to make an informed decision, leading them to feel self-confident and supported.
Goal: Our goal is to make a website that is transparent, intuitive and accessible. Our hope is that this will drive more traffic to the website.
Impact: Through our dedication to transparency and accessibility, we envision a future where every animal receives the love and care they deserve. With a meticulously organized and thoughtfully designed website, users will experience enhanced ease of navigation and interaction, leading to more successful adoptions and happier outcomes for pets and their new families.
Building Context
Building the background context to inform design decisions
I used affinity diagraming to help me systematically arrange the qualitative data gathered from interviews, surveys, and usability tests. Through this process, I was able to distill a comprehensive user insight, covering the essence of the users desires, pain points, and aspirations.
Takeaways:
Users are busy
People are nervous that disabled or elderly animals would be too hard to take care of
Half the users adopted from shelter and half bought from breeders
Users really wanted to see more images and reviews on the website
User Insights
The users are altruistic, kind, have an open heart, and need sufficient information about each animal's specific special needs to allow them to make a more informed decision on whether they would be able to adopt and care for an elderly or disabled animal.
Heuristic Evaluation
I found that the main navigation was cluttered, lacked clarity and did not follow intuitive LATCH principals
The layout of the pages varied greatly, making each part of the site feel like a separate website entirely. Lacked flow.
Competitor Analysis
Competing websites/apps did not focus on information hierarchy
Lacked information on how to adopt special needs pets
Lots of information was outdated
Other websites/apps had good call to action buttons, strong headers nd easy navigation
User Persona
I created user personas to understand and empathize with my target audience, leading to better decisions in product development, marketing, and user experience, ensuring my solutions are user-centered and effective.
Affinity Diagraming
Ideation
Refining designs for improvement and inspiring innovative design ideas.
I used the user insight to kickstart the design process for the Pepper Foundation website. First, I created a storyboard to map out the user's journey. Then I looked at the website's architecture by developing sitemaps, user flows, and conducting card sorting exercises. These steps help to make the site more intuitive, guiding users towards the ultimate goal: adopting a disabled or elderly pet.
Website Architecture
The sitemap helped me organize and prioritize the website's content. Through this I discovered that many of the sites separate pages could be consolidated into a single, streamlined page.
Creating a user flow gave me insights into how users may navigate my website, highlighting areas for improvement to enhance their experience. This is an example of the users flow for adopting a pet.
UI/ Layout
Once I had the website's flow down, I started working on the user interface by creating a low-fidelity prototype. Along the way, I integrated feedback from usability testing and user research to make sure the site had plenty of visuals and was easy to navigate.
I curated a comprehensive UI style guide for the Pepper Foundation, emphasizing inviting color palettes, a refreshed logo, and warm welcoming imagery.
After refining my prototype through user testing, I iterated on the findings to create a final high-fidelity prototype. The testing revealed that our navigation was intuitive and user-friendly. Additionally, it highlighted the need for more comprehensive information about each special needs/elderly animals.
