LIMERICK ANIMAL WELFARE

Context
The charity of Limerick Animal Welfare is experiencing a high volume of users visiting their social media presence on Facebook every day. While the Facebook page is well-known and established among the users, the website struggles in comparison with an outdated design and a lack of important functionalities. For example, the Facebook page has become one of the central hubs for users to report their animals missing. Limerick Animal Welfare shares this information on their page via a post which reaches more than 66.000 followers.

Research
The research phase of this group project was broken up into three different research methodologies. This would allow us to gather multiple different feedback channels together to get the most representative results.
Firstly, we conducted Guerilla Testing in Cafés which is a very fast and cost efficient method. When carrying out Guerilla Testing, we select participants randomly in public places and ask them to carry out defined tasks. In this case we asked the volunteers to test the current design of the Limerick Animal Welfare website. This would allow us to identify issues which would have to be addressed in our redesign.
Secondly, we conducted 5 Second Tests, which, as the name suggests, are very rapid tests of a design or product. In our case we asked our participants to look at the homepage of the Limerick Animal Welfare website for five seconds and then answer a few follow-up questions. These questions were aimed at finding out if the current design was effective in what it is supposed to offer to the user.
Lastly, we carried out a classic online survey, which we sent out to frequent users of the Limerick Animal Welfare website. Here we were specifically looking for common issues with the current design and information about which use-cases exist.

Analysis
‍Following the initial research phase we were able to extract some pain points and issues that user had with the current design of the website. Where some of the problems were simply related to the information architecture of the charities website other issues were caused by visual design decisions.
Moving forward we put our focus on problem areas which made the interaction with the website difficult in regards to reporting a missing animal and adopting an animal. A heavy focus was put onto information architecture which was achieved through user card sorting exercises. This ensured a logical and intuitive structure of the website.
Carrying out a competitor analysis on other animal related charities helped us to find common features and visual designs that have already been implemented and adapted by users.

Improved Features
‍‍With the help of our user research we were able to compile a list of improvements that would address some of the issues of the current design. For the purpose of the prototype we focused on two main features which included an emergency button that would let the user report a missing animal or animal cruelty, and a complete redesign of the re-homing section with a more personal touch.
Some other features include a sleeker visual design, an easier system for donations with pre-set amounts and more user friendly directions and opening hours. Finally, we created a help and advice sections with useful information and put an emphasis on web accessibility and responsive design.

Usability Testing
‍‍In order to ensure that the final design will be adapted quickly by new users we carried out some usability testing with potential end-users. These tests were conducted remotely and in person and consisted of a list of tasks that had to carried out by the participants. While carrying out the tasks we as designers observed their interactions carefully and asked follow-up questions. With the feedback from these usability tests we compiled a list of improvements and changed the design accordingly before submission.