Case Study: Greyhound Rescue Austin
THE PROBLEM
Website Redesign for Greyhound Rescue Austin
TEAM & TIMELINE
Our three person UX design team had two weeks to complete all phases of this project.
TOOLS
Adobe XD and Photoshop, InVision, Miro, Trello, and Google Drive, Forms, Docs, Sheets.
KEY GOAL
Our goal was to redesign the website around users’ primary needs for adopting a greyhound.
Greyhound Rescue Austin (GRA) is dedicated to rescuing, rehabilitating and rehoming greyhound dogs in Austin, TX. However, the website hinders the GRA mission, due to outdated visuals, poor functionality and a lack of perceived professionalism. This posed a significant problem because people were distrustful of the website and ultimately hesitant to meet perspective greyhounds to adopt.
MY ROLE:
UX Researcher
As the lead UX researcher, I gathered user insights and motivations from prospective users of the GRA website. Qualitative and quantitative methods enabled us to discover attitudes toward the dog adoption process and a pattern of online behavior.
Qualitative data was generated by interviewing people who had experience adopting a dog with the aid of a website. For quantitative data, we posted our survey to online group boards that favored greyhound dogs and experience with adopting dogs.
Researching with empathy allowed us to uncover our overarching problem with three important questions: why do people use a website to search for prospective dogs to adopt? How do people go about using the current GRA website to meet this goal? What is the strategy of achieving this goal?
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UNDERSTANDING THE USER
After transcribing the interviews and gathering survey data, Affinity diagrams were used to organize and frame user motivations and insights. We learned that people judge the legitimacy of a dog adoption agency based on the look of the organization’s website.
During this process we formed our problem statement, completed a competitor analysis, and looked at the behavior of visitors to the current GRA webpage by using website analytics. This culminated into a user persona to illuminate our target user goals, frustrations and pain points.
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Our user persona, Cindy, enabled us to clarify the user experience and represent our research findings. The ideal user inquires about a specific dog from the GRA before committing to an on-site meeting. With this in mind, we sketched a storyboard depicting the emotional sticking point between our user goal and frustration points.
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THE PROCESS
The design and iteration phase included card sorting to evaluate the information architecture of the GRA website. We drafted a flow chart and a feature prioritization diagram, which led to our first low fidelity wireframes. The redesign included a responsive web design suitable for desktop, tablet and mobile devices.
Insights gleaned from our prototype user testing suggested that users wanted to know more about each available dog. We added biographical success stories about each dog, which included high-touch details. Our adoption page includes a filtered search with tags to help users’ find the right dog. Additionally, we executed A/B testing to confirm our last hi-fidelity iteration.
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We redesigned the GRA website around users’ primary needs of adopting greyhound dogs. Our redesign modernizes the website, and helps this non-profit organization carry out their mission: Rescue Greyhounds.
OUTCOMES
Filtered Search
Our redesign makes it easier for people to use the GRA website to adopt, foster, donate. The original GRA website’s homepage displayed a cluttered navigation design and fonts too small to read. See below for more before after designs.
Trust the Heart
We added a progress bar and statistics of how the donation positively affected saving greyhounds, enabling users feel and see the contribution impact. We did A/B testing, which informed us of the best icon to show a user’s favorite dog (Heart vs. Star icons).
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Dogs Need A Story
Users want to learn about greyhounds, so we added a featured story section with personal success stories to reach out to users on a personal level. Our adoption page includes a filtered search with tags user criteria to find a dog they want.
TITLE OF THE CALLOUT BLOCK
LESSONS LEARNED
Understanding our users allowed us to create user-centered solutions that support the goals of Greyhound Rescue Austin. Involving our users throughout the design process informed us that the search utility and dog biography pages were important design updates to help people find the right adoptable greyhounds.
We also learned that there’s an emotional connection between the user and the website. The old GRA website displayed adorable pictures of greyhounds that provoked emotional interest for users. However, without enough details about each dog, users objected to using the GRA because they lacked confidence in a potential match. Our redesign capitalized on this missed opportunity by showcasing the biography of each dog, which made it easier to arrange a live in-person meeting.