NATCAT

UX Associate | 2 Week Turnaround | 3-Person Team

After being tasked with improving upon a non-profit agency, our goal was to improve the National Cat Protection Society’s (NatCat’s) webpage by making it easier to navigate with clear CTAs for adopting, volunteering and donating. The homepage currently appears outdated and poorly maintained, creating an unease for visitors to the site to adopt or donate. By creating a clean, contemporary design, we believed we could address these issues and improve the organization’s site traffic as well as increase adoptions, donations, and volunteer sign-ups.

The Process

We spent most of our allotted time on research, developing ideas, and fleshing out our user. The intent was to have a solid understanding of the pain points of the website as well as clear insight into the ‘why’ before we started breaking down and rebuilding.

NatCat is an established non-profit with a great history behind it, and nothing but 5-star reviews on all platforms, but they only have a small number of reviews, are not popping up in searches as a ‘top’ place to adopt, and lack name recognition.

  • With 37 responses to our online survey and four in-person interviews, we got a great insight into why people weren’t spending time on the current website, and why they were so apprehensive to give money or donate their time. The above is a small selection of responses that we found helpful to directing our resulting design.

    Between the Competitive and SWOT analyses, we found that there was a lot of room for improvement in this area as a whole—other local adoption sites weren’t fulfilling the needs of our users, not just NatCat. This really helped give credence to our design even further down the road and set up the basis for future plans.

  • When we started our user persona, we already had an idea of who our user was from the initial responses we got as well as our proto persona, but our user became more defined as we finished our interviews and received such a large number of survey responses.

    Throughout the whole process, we kept in mind the users’ needs, wants, and far-reaching goals, trying to find ways to incorporate into design or determine if they work at all.

    Our goal with the UX Scenario and Journey Map was to clearly illustrate our user’s struggles, which helped to solidify our problem statement while supporting our resulting solution. These two items are intricately connected, but reinforce each others’ validity.

  • We believe that people in the market for new pets have an overwhelming number of options and that creating a usable website may solve this problem by allowing its users to easily search for adoptable cats as well as quickly find information on volunteering and donating. We will know we have succeeded when more adoptions and donations are completed and time spent on site increases.

  • After reviewing our users’ pain points, scenario, and journey map, as well as other feedback from our surveys and research, we delivered a solution. The current website is not serving users, but neither are many of the competitors. We opted to keep the solution simple, remaining true to the original feel of the established brand while giving users more confidence to adopt, volunteer, and donate.