Wild Bird Fund
Website ReDesign
Role: UX Strategy & Design
When: May 2019
Duration: Two weeks
What: Personal project, Redesign of existing website
Objective
The Wild Bird Fund is a non-profit animal welfare organization based in New York City. Their mission is to provide medical care and rehabilitation to native and passing migrant wildlife so that they can be released back into the wild. They also aim to educate New Yorkers about the rich diversity of the city’s wildlife and how to help it thrive. The task for this site is to improve usability so users can get the information they need, update the site, and create a new user flow to increase donation rates.
Mission
Improve usability, update the look and feel of the site, and increase participation in WBF Programs
Market
Mission-focused individuals of all ages looking to help, companies and individuals active in charity work.
Problem
The Wild Bird Fund site can be difficult to navigate and has a lot of copy, making finding the information a user needs to help an animal or donate difficult.
Solution
Simplify and update Wild Bird Fund's site to effectively educated and guide users to information they need, and donations
Research Takeaways
Through surveys and usability testing, I learned about peoples perceptions of the site and confirmed assumptions about behaviors related to animal rescue.
Research oriented people are more likely to help an animal in need, and call or check online with a group for what to do, but if they do not think they can help or can't locate information they will do nothing.
Confident, animal loving individuals will act first and seek information later, potentially resulting in harm to the animal.
Personas
Using the insights from the interviews I was able to develop two personas of which to base the designs off of.
Usability Testing
When usability testing Wild Bird Fund's site, I learned that while the pages educating users about caring for an animal or to donations were found quickly, users had difficulty navigating the large amounts of information to find what they needed.
During the test, users would often stop looking after skimming through one section on the rescue page, missing important information.
Sitemaps
A redesign of the individual user flow simplifying the process for users
For the design, I focused mainly on simplifying the site so that users could find the information they needed in order to help.
By adding the phone number to the header, condensing less utilized items into the footer, and removing unnecessary modules and copy, I created an experience optimal for finding information users would need in a rescue situation.
Wireframes
A collection of wireframes from the site
