Love Me True Rescue Redesign

Love Me True Rescue is a nonprofit cat rescue organization in Ponte Viedra, FL. Though they have a great reputation among locals, our team believed that with a refreshing updated website, their outreach and interest levels for both adoption and donation could be improved.

Note: Images shown throughout may be too small to read: click here to view our original Google Slides report with links to our files.

Goals

Research Goals:

Understand what drives people to choose where and why they donate, adopt, and/or volunteer.
Gather adoption, donation, and volunteering rates for Floridians and marry that information with the qualitative insights from above.

Design Goals:

Create a delightful interactive experience, making the donation, adoption, and volunteering process simple, easy, and fun.

Methods

For this project we mainly wanted to focus on the "why": why people interact with nonprofits, and why they don't. Most of our insights came from interviewing people who have interacted with nonprofits, filling in the blanks with people who haven't, and getting some extra insight from broad surveys about nonprofit work in general. On top of that, we also performed a competitor analysis to see what works for large-scale NPOs and get ideas on ways we can improve our own site.

We interviewed 5 participants aged 25-60 who have interacted with NPOs before
We focused our questions on what would encourage/deter someone to interact with a nonprofit.
We also wanted to know about previous NPO experiences, positive or negative.

We surveyed 30 Florida citizens age 18 and above who may or may not have interacted with NPOs.
We were surprised to see that the majority of respondents had volunteered, but only half had donated more than one time in a year.

Competitor Analysis of four large-scale animal rescue nonprofits.
tl;dr: well-established NPOs use bright, fun design without being too flashy; small bites of information at a time; transparency and honesty.

Key Findings

Most of the people we interviewed expressed a distrust in nonprofits. Some had been mislead or even scammed in the past; others had poor experiences in the past, or knew someone who had poor experiences.
People care about the quality of life for the cats in the shelters. They would not support shelters that euthanize animals or keep them in unhappy conditions.
Other larger nonprofit websites are attention-grabbing without being obnoxious, making the website experience fun, informative, and interactive.

New style guide features bold yet inviting design, drawing the eye to key buttons and selectors.

High-fidelity homepage wireframes (desktop and mobile) with clear, simple information and mission statement (for transparency), bold calls to action, cute and fun design.

High-fidelity donation page wireframes (desktop and mobile) shows clear flow to reduce overwhelm.
Each donation option provides breakdown of how funds will be used at that level to maintain honesty with users.

We tested our new website and all users were fully able to use the website.
However, users sometimes took unintended paths to reach the places they were searching for, such as using only the links in the footer on mobile.

Reflection

This project hammered in the importance of doing user research for our team, because we had very different expectations for our user interview and survey responses than what we received. Without our interviews, we would have designed a website centered around our preconceived notion that NPOs are respected and trusted by most people. It was so important to learn that people actually have a hard time with trusting NPOs, because it completely reshaped the essence of our design, made it more friendly, inviting, and focused entirely on transparency.