Case study: Animal shelter website project
The goal of animal shelter project was to help animals to find a new home in much faster and more efficient way, by building people’s awareness about the needs of the shelter and its inhabitants. Project also supposed to improve shelter’s employee comfort of work and reduce the time needed to complete everyday tasks.
Design process
Research
When I looked for useful information that I could use in this project, I focused mostly on:
- Articles about shelters, their needs and reviews with shelter’s employee,
- My and my friends experience when we had an opportunity to adopt a pet from shelter,
- Benchmark based on several shelter’s sites, and systems built to support shelter’s employees
Opportunity Canvas
To gather and organise data I used Opportunity Canvas, so I could focus on things I’m sure of or those which are just my assumptions. I didn’t have to fill all of canvas’ boxes, but it really powered my work at the very beginning.
Conclusions
People interested in adopting a pet very often… :
- make their choice by the appearance of animals, not their temperament or other characteristics,
- if their first choice is bad, they tend to give up very quickly,
- think pet can be a great gift,
- build their ego by donating a lot of the cheapest food (the more the better), meanwhile the shelter needs expensive veterinary food or donation for surgery or medication, maintaining doghouse etc.,
- are discouraged if process of adoption takes several steps,
- don’t know what is a virtual adoption and what are alternative way to help.
People who already adopted a pet need:
- a possibility of consultation with previous animal keeper — especially in the first days (but not only),
- need a medical history of a pet.
Shelter’s employees, volunteers and Vet:
- need to keep detailed and updated history of a pet in actual system but it’s very time consuming,
- most of used actual internal systems (shelter website / veterinary pet register / task manager) are not connected what is hard to maintain the same data everywhere.
Personas
Basing on the canvas conclusions, I created to personas: a person who wants to adopt a pet and the shelter worker.
Information architecture
User flow
I created prototypes and user flow:
- user enter the home page,
- user goes to the tab “Adopt”,
- user decides to answer a few questions to choose the pet who fits his lifestyle,
- user see the quiz result, he may also choose another pet and go to the catalog of all available pets,
- user choose another pet from the catalog and read the details (with tags like “active”, “young”, “sterilised”, “not a fan of children”), full description and healthcare history.
