Humane SOCIETY OF GREATER MIAMI REDESIGN

The Humane Society of Greater Miami is a nonprofit organization that offers 
services such as adoption, fostering, volunteering, and collecting donations for dogs and cats in need. The primary goal was to redesign the organization's desktop, mobile, and tablet sites to improve accessibility and engagement.

(Click here to visit the prototype)

What I Did

In a team of four, we conducted research, defining, ideations, prototyping, and testing. I was responsible for User Research, User Testing, and the Tablet Prototype. Overall our goal was to redesign the non-profit’s desktop, mobile, and tablet sites to increase engagement and accessibility. 

The Problem

The Humane Society’s website aims to connect animal lovers with loving animals waiting to get adopted. However, upon evaluation of their website, we believe there are issues in regards to the layout, color pallets, and information that could potentially be hindering potential adopters looking on the site.

The Process

We began with creating our proto persona to help us get started with planning our user research like user interviews, user persona, and heuristic evaluations. From there we built on the research through definition and ideation phases like card sorting and user journey maps. All this information got us started on early renditions of our prototypes and after the user testing, we made iterations that would allow us to complete our final high-fidelity prototype.

Usability Research & Findings

Our user research consisted of a stakeholder interview, competitor analysis, heuristic evaluation, user observations, proto/user persona, affinity diagram, surveys, user interviews, and an empathy map. Our user and stakeholder interviews were extremely helpful, in which we provided 20 questions to help create our user persona and that helped us all throughout our research.


Ideation Design

The methods we used for ideation were user scenarios, storyboarding, card sorting, site mapping, and a user journey map. We prioritize our ideation off on the information gathered in user interviews and Brenda James, our user persona. We wanted to support our user hypothesis and value proposition statement, our goal was to create a strong foundation for the prototyping that was to come.

Usability Testing & Findings

We held a round of 5 interviews for the mid-fidelity prototypes and a round of 5 interviews for the high-fidelity prototypes. Gathering notes from all the tests and returning to the prototypes for iterations. A few iterations we made were increasing the text size in the nav bar, making the dropdown arrow larger, making corrections to the mobile prototype, changes to the adoption page, and making the donation page easier to access.



Our main focuses were the dropdown menu, navigation bar, locating the adoption page and the animals included, locating the foster page and clicking through the carousel, and examining the footer and locating the donation page. By the end of the testing, we were able to accomplish the goals we set out by making the responsive web design more engaging, more informative without being overwhelming, and accessible.

Conclusion

We made the sites more engaging and organized the information originally on the site in a more compact form. The user testing was most helpful in reassuring that the changes made the site more interesting and easier to navigate. For future opportunities, I would increase the number of user testing during all prototype phases.