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Product Overview
About the Product
West Orange Animal Shelters needed a responsive website to showcase adoptable animals and unite them with their ideal homes.
My Role
Lead UX designer, designing a responsive website for West Orange Animal Shelters. Responsible for conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and iterating on designs.
The Problem
Adoptive pet owners need an easy-to-use, visually driven way to connect with shelter pets at multiple locations in the West Orange Animal Shelters system and apply for adoption. Users need a responsive website that works well on any device, and fosters an emotional connection between them and adoptable pets, while delivering relevant information.
The Goal
Design an engaging and easy-to-use responsive website that empowers adoptive pet owners to find the perfect shelter pet for them.
Design Process
Mapping Ileana’s journey helped me understand the goals and challenges of prospective first-time pet adopters.
Starting the Design
I drafted paper wireframes focused on delivering a customizable and easy-to-use search experience for finding adoptable pets. Additionally, I began exploring how the designs would adapt to different screen sizes, like smartphones.
When turning the ideas from the paper wireframes into digital wireframes, I remained focused on our user research to try to deliver the easiest possible pet search experience. User testing revealed that people needed a more curated experience on the homepage and a separate page to search, so I incorporated those insights into the design. Wireframes for other screen sizes like smartphones were created to plan how the design would respond to different viewports.
I connected the digital wireframe screens according to the main user flow to create a low-fidelity prototype in Adobe XD.
After performing usability studies with the low-fidelity prototype and finalizing the basic user flow, I created high-fidelity mockup screens that reflect how the final product will look. I applied West Orange Animal Shelter's branding, like logos and colors, and added realistic imagery and text. I also applied the final layout and type for the design.
Finalizing the Design
I connected the high-fidelity mockup frames to create this high-fidelity prototype, representing the final design for West Orange Animal Shelters’ new website.
Key Takeaways
The app provides an engaging and easy-to-use way for adoptive pet owners to find their ideal companion. Since launching the site, the shelter has seen a significant increase in pet adoptions.
While designing West Orange Animal Shelters’ website, I learned a lot about designing the UI for database-style navigation within pages on a larger website.
- Perform additional usability testing to determine specific ways the site can be improved further.
- Conduct studies centered around accessibility, consulting with organizations that provide service animals, to possibly integrate that as a service of the site.
- Conduct further user research to find out how current featured could be refined, or new features could be created.
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