Heart of Texas Lab Rescue
A redesign of the Heart of Texas Lab Rescue website to modernize the look and feel and improve the donation experience.
My role: Project Manager, UX, UI, Research​
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Project Overview
The problem: The current Heart of Texas Lab Rescue website feels dated, overwhelming, and it is generally difficult to navigate.
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The solution: Updating the UI, creating strong and consistent call to actions, and simplifying the overall user experience.
Research
We initially attempted to reach out to the owner of Heart of Texas Lab Rescue but ended up unsuccessful in this attempt. Since we were unable to gather insights from a stakeholder, we started the project with a survey and 15 user interviews.
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Survey goal: We gathered survey results from 47 individuals using resources such as Reddit, Instagram, and Linkedin. The goal of the survey was to uncover general information of potential users (age, living situation, etc.) as well as donation and adoption behaviors when interacting with an animal adoption website.
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User Interviews: We conducted 15 user interviews to help us better understand the needs of users.
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Interview Insights:
+ The donation options were not clear to the user
+ Users wanted a faster and easier way to make a donation
+ Users felt the website felt dated and a bit untrustworthy due to broken links and missing information.
Competitve Analysis
To gain a greater understanding of the current market, we completed a competitive analysis. We explored other local Austin pet adoption websites.
Austin Animal Center
Strengths:
Clear CTAs
Clear nagivation
Easy to use​
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Weakness:
Focuses more on city animal resources than general adoption and donation
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Happy Hearts Dog Rescue
Strengths:
Good branding
Updated UI compared to others
Strong training content
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Weakness:
Information hierarchy
Too wordy
Austin Pets Alive
Strengths:
Prioritizes donations
Highlights dogs of the week
Appears to be updated often
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Weakness:
Overwhelming ​
Too many options
Too many pop ups
Persona
Using insights from our interviews and research, we created a persona that reflected our target user, Paige. Paige is a 39-year-old female that would love to adopt a pet when the time is right and is also passionate about donating to causes close to her heart and in her community.
Ideation
We started the ideation phase with "I like, I wish, what if?", then a feature prioritization matrix, and moved on to user flows.
Low-Fi Wireframes
We created a set of simple low-fidelity wireframes in order to focus strictly on the usability of the site and see if users were able to donate easily.
