Enhance the digital experience for an animal sanctuary website

Project type

UX design, Information Architecture

Product type

Website

Client

Student project

Timeline

January - May 2022

My role

UX designer
UX researcher
Solo student project for Information Architecture & Interaction Design Class - MS Information Experience Design - Pratt Institute

Gentle Barn

A non-profit organization whose mission is to rescue and take care of abused, neglected, and abandoned animals.

Gentle Barn website is used to call for donation and animal sponsorship as well as update animals’ information, and communicate offering services (farm tours, event hosting, cow hug therapy sessions).

For the Information Architecture & Interaction Design course in our master program at Pratt Institute, I was tasked to identify problems on Gentle Barn website and use design solutions to solve them.

Redesign outcome

Before

After

Website redesign process

Current website's issues

Problem 1

Difficult to navigate & find information

Problem 2

Unclear mission and activities that hesitate potential donors

Problem 3

Hard to quickly find animals’s information and ways to donate

Problem 4

Outdated style & cluttered layout

Proposed solutions

1

Revise the information architecture

2

Highlight organization’s mission and activities on the front page

3

Redesign “Animals” page and “Donate” page

4

Refresh the website’s visual with a more contemporary and appealing look

Understand animal lovers' goals and behaviors

Creating an information structure that makes sense to users

Card sorting study

7 participants

46 cards

Optimal workshop

Tree testing study

6 participants

6 tasks

Optimal workshop

A revised site map that improves the content findability for users

Sketching out the new information layout

Testing with users to evaluate the design direction

Tools

InVision, paper, pencil, zoom

method

Moderated user testing

Findings

Wireframes

Final prototype

Style guide

Reflection

What I would do differently

Even though I had the freedom to make every decision during this project, there are several things I would do differently in oder to create a more impactful redesign:

I would interview real users of the website to address their pain points and the true problems they were facing.
I also want to talk to the stakeholders and website owners to understand their goals and vision for the website, the reasonings behind the existing website’s content, and see how success looks like for them.

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What I learn from this project

Being the designer & research in this project helped me better understand the design process, specifically how the result of each step could contribute to the final solution I proposed to revamp the website.