Kindness Matters Ferret Rescue Redesign Case Study
Designing a cohesive brand guide and website dedicated to educating people about the proper care of ferrets as well as encouraging the adoption of ferrets into loving homes.
Project Date: Spring 2023 — Spring 2024
Group Project —
Members: Abbie Hunt, Jillian Petro, Yazmeen Renova
We collaboratively handled design, development, and client relationships.
Project Overview
Kindness Matters is a ferret rescue located in Acworth, GA that specializes in ferret care and education. We chose to work with this client for our capstone project due to their need for online expansion and used our collaborative skills to create a new brand identity, a full website redesign, and a social media strategy for the organization to use at their discretion.
The tools and software we used throughout our project journey were Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Figma, Canva, Adobe Express, SquareSpace,and various AI image generators.
The Problem
When we began working with our client, we sat down to discuss what her main concerns were with her online presence. From this discussion, we quickly recognized that she had big ideas on what she wanted to do for her website and social media presence, but she didn’t have the bandwidth to do them since she is the sole owner of the rescue. To maximize our time, we decided to prioritize a few key objectives and dove in headfirst. We began conducting thorough testing and research from a user perspective, which is where we identified several pain points with our client’s website that hindered its effectiveness and overall user experience.
Below are some of the things our team identified as major issues:
- No consistent branding or style guide — giving the site a visually incohesive aesthetic and reducing the website’s professional appearance.
- Disorganized website structure — making navigation a challenge for users looking for information about ferret adoption and care.
- Social media integration missing — limiting the rescue’s online presence and outreach.
- Difficulty editing the website — inhibiting the client from being able to make updates and improvements as needed.
- Blog page with no content — there was a page dedicated for blogs, however, the page was blank. This limited the opportunity for our client to provide in-depth information related to ferret welfare and education.
- Unclear donation options — creating a barrier for supporters wanting to contribute to the rescue’s cause.
In response to the challenges that we identified, we created a design inspiration quiz for our client to take for us to gauge what aesthetic she wanted before we started our first draft of her new style guide. Recognizing the importance of establishing a cohesive visual direction, we prioritized the creation of this style guide as the foundational step in outlining the framework for her website. Drawing insights from the quiz answers, we crafted the new style guide, paving the way for the creation of our website prototype. This prototype was then meticulously designed to resolve all the earlier identified obstacles, ensuring a more effective overall solution for our client.
The Solution
Brand Identity —
When we first met with our client, she expressed that, above all, she wanted her business to be perceived as educational, professional, and friendly. In the current state, the rescue lacked an established brand identity and formal style guide, which can lead to major issues when wanting to create a website with a professional feel. The original colors, fonts, and logo gave off the impression that the site was created by someone inexperienced and may not be a credible organization. Recognizing the importance of establishing that brand identity for Kindness Matters, we prioritized this as our first step in assisting our client to shape the desired perception of her organization.
We faced challenges during the initial stages of brainstorming for the new branding identity with our client due to a conflict of design preference. Her vision incorporated the integration of cool, calming tones, while our team’s vision incorporated a more playful color palette. In the end, we tried to create a color palette that met somewhere in the middle — both visions with the primary palette being cool tones and the secondary set offering punches of bright colors for accent elements.
Also, we had several conversations with our client about her existing logo for the ferret rescue that was designed by an animal artist. Yet, it received significant criticism during our initial round of user testing interviews, prompting us to pivot towards a total logo redesign. While our client expressed satisfaction with her original logo and reluctance to adopt a new one, we believed it would be best to design something complementary to the new brand/style guide, especially when if she opts to utilize the new branding in the future.
In the end, our brand/style guide aimed to portray ferrets as approachable and playful, yet also capable of conveying a serious tone for educational purposes on ferret ownership. We were inspired by a modern-day 70s vibe with a professional twist, and we believe our final result effectively meets our client’s original objectives.
Website Redesign —
Once we had all the pieces needed for the brand identity, we were ready to dive into the website redesign. The rescue’s original website design needed assistance with the following:
- Branding — there was no cohesive aesthetic.
- Structure/Flow — it was extremely confusing and had multiple web pages that repeated similar information.
- Blog — our client wanted to introduce a blog section for more in-depth topics and the current page for blogs was completely blank.
- Show Expertise & Encourage Ferret Education — all the various resources for ferret care and education needed to be reorganized.
- Software — our client needed a specific website builder and editor for the future that was easy for her to use.
Branding
The original rescue website did not showcase a consistent brand, and it often made users feel like they were navigating through different websites, especially when sifting through ferret care topics. With this in mind, we wanted to make sure that the new branding was consistently represented throughout each page. The goal was to make the rescue feel more polished, and in turn, make future donors and adoptive families feel more confident in the validity of the rescue.
Structure/Flow
Each member of our team heavily researched other rescue websites to gain an understanding of the competition as well as to learn what other organizations did right or wrong through a new user perspective. This research assisted us with ideas on how to represent all the needs of the ferret rescue and how to organize each section into a simple structure for the easiest navigation. For example, we condensed the initial nine navigation toolbar choices into a more streamlined set of five broader options with drop-down options.
Another example of a restructure involved the “Support” page. Here users encountered challenges in locating all the ways to contribute to the rescue — whether through financial donations, volunteering, adoption, fostering, wishlist items, etc. there was no clear way to locate all the options available in an easy to read manner. To address this, we wanted to have a concise menu of various support avenues on a generalized “Support” page, accompanied by specific subpages detailing each specific method. The wishlist options webpage now showcases individual store blocks for each option, enabling users to conveniently view all available choices simultaneously.
Blog
One of the top requests from our client was a space for a blog, so that she could elaborate more on ferret topics, such as specific ferret diseases. She had several topics that she had already researched and typed up; they only lacked somewhere to be published. She also wanted to use this space to encourage her Facebook followers to navigate to her blog posts and read for more information — especially when it is a topic that may be too in-depth for a simple Facebook post.
We were able to create a blog page and move some of her posts over to our new website while also giving her ample potential to add more. This page allows her to post articles with images or videos and she can link them on Facebook to drive more traffic. That being said, this blog page could be a critical tool for her to use on social media to increase engagement on Facebook and Instagram which is discussed later in our Social Media Strategy plan.
Show Expertise & Encourage Ferret Education
There were an abundance of resources for ferret care and education in general on the original website, but all those topics needed to be organized in a more streamlined way. We created dedicated sections and pages on the website where the rescue can now compile guides for any ferret issue. Users do not have to sift through all the topics to find the exact one they need — they are now organized in an accordion menu and pop-out with the necessary information only when clicked on.
Software
Our client has limited technology skills, so we thought it would be best to go with a web hosting and editing product that is user-friendly and easy for her to make future changes without our assistance. Her current website is hosted on WordPress, which she is unable to navigate with ease. After researching, SquareSpace was the answer due to its ease of editing and modern functionality options that our client was wanting to pursue in the future, such as all donations coming through the website versus other various apps/websites.
Social Media Strategy —
The Kindness Matters Ferret Rescue online presence was solely limited to its website and Facebook page. Our client had the goal of branching out to other social media avenues but was unsure of how to be successful on those platforms or where to begin. With this goal in mind, our team created a social media strategy plan to assist the rescue in its expansion — providing the rescue with the following:
- Suggested Rules of Content
- Posting Frequency
- Rescue Hashtags
- Planning & Implementation Technology
- Post Ideas/Categories
- Monthly Required Posts examples
- Future Post Ideas examples
- Potential Post Calendar
- Post Inspiration
- Potential Social Media Flowchart
We feel that this all-inclusive social media strategy plan can help our client in leaps and bounds by increasing her website engagement when used correctly.
User Testing —
Everything we tested and created ourselves was great, but it didn’t matter if we thought it was great or not. We needed expert testers that would walk through every task a potential user would try to accomplish to see where there was any friction or major flaws that we may have overlooked. So we developed a User Research Plan that explicitly lays out who we are testing, what we’re testing, and why.
We conducted our user testing via Zoom with 8 highly qualified individuals. Among them were three men aged 23–30 and five women aged 23–35. Each participant either owned, currently owns, or expressed a desire to own a ferret in the future. Each of them shared a passion for animals and had previous experience working with animal rescues. Additionally, they expressed frustrations with existing animal rescue websites.
Pre-test and post-test survey
For the UX testing process, we created a pre-test aimed at understanding our users better. This survey enabled us to gauge our users’ familiarity with ferrets, their experience with websites, and their preferences regarding website and mobile usage. This information allowed us to customize our user testing approach accordingly. We used both a combination of open/close-ended questions and rating scales, (specifically: Likert and semantic differential) in our pre-test.
Pre-test questions:
We also implemented a post-test survey as part of our user testing process, which was beneficial in several ways. Unlike the pre-test, the post-test allowed users to provide additional feedback or suggestions, acknowledging that individuals may recall additional thoughts or prefer written communication for expressing concerns. It included inquiries about users’ likelihood to recommend the website to others and their overall comfort during the survey. Gathering such information allowed us to continuously enhance our user testing experience with each interview.
Post-test questions:
Quantitative Findings
Our goal was to get our 8 participants to accomplish 10 tasks in under 30 seconds. To do this we created a table of tasks and monitored them while they tried to navigate through the assignments. One of us told them the task, one of us watched their behavior and took notes, and one of us timed. We were able to identify a few different touch points that had friction that we weren’t aware of before the testing, which may sound like bad news but it was great for us because it meant that the testing was working!
One of the tasks was to tell us more about the rescue owner and back story, which we thought would be an easy task. However, it took an average of 35.25 seconds to complete this task, so we knew we had to make some changes. Making this website more personal was a top priority for our client, so this task meeting its goal was important to us.
Another point of friction that we thought would be seamless was when we asked our interviewee, “You want to get a gift card to a specific store to support the rescue and their needs. What are some stores where a donor could get a gift card for?” To find this answer you would need to locate the support option “Wish List”. This was the biggest discussion that sparked within our testing environment because it was our lowest passing task with an average of 62.5% passing rate. The users were unsure what “Wish List” meant and would often navigate to the donation page to answer the question. We decided to rename the “Wish List” page to “Items Needed” in order to give clarity about the context of what lived on this page. It is crucial for this organization to receive donations in all forms in order to survive, and having a user not understand where to find the items needed to donate is not acceptable.
Changes like these may seem slight, but the average task time for locating the items needed page was almost 40 seconds and our research tells us that by this point most users will have given up and gone to a different page or website altogether. Resulting in the organization missing out on an opportunity to gain a loyal patron all because of a slight change in wording. Our user testing taught us a tremendous amount about how critical it is to test anything you design because there is only so much you’re able to see when your lens is zoomed in on a project for an extended period of time.
Qualitative Findings
Product reaction cards were developed by Microsoft as part of a “desirability toolkit” created to understand the elusive, intangible aspect of desirability resulting from a user’s experience with a product. We came up with a list of 118 words for our users to choose from and explain why they chose them as a way to identify the way the brand and website are perceived. The number that appeared the most times with a frequency of 5 out of 8 was “Easy to Use”. (Cue the applause) because that’s what every UX/UI designer strives for their product to be and the biggest focus our team had when building this website.
User Feedback
At the end of every interview we emailed the participants their post-survey. Sending the survey after the recording had concluded gives them an opportunity to explore the page on their own as they answer the questions. We were able to gather valuable feedback from this survey and enjoyed hearing how our website resonated with each of them.
Results
The experience we gained from working with our client prepared us for future endeavors in ways we didn’t expect. Managing our time was our biggest challenge; we knew that it would be difficult to plan meetings between our three person team, however, we didn’t factor in allowing enough time for our client to see the iterations, give feedback, and then time for us to make changes before our grades were due. Each of us had different design ideas, so we knew we had to find a way to create something we all liked. However, we hadn’t initially considered the impact of integrating our client’s perspective as a fourth voice into the creative process.
This project went beyond client interaction though. We delved into a world that married business and creativity by designing a brand identity and style guide from scratch and a website that required us to think strategically about the intricacies of crafting a compelling online presence. The whole experience expanded our skillset and showed us how important it is to be flexible, timely, and how to manage expectations in the ever-changing world of design and marketing.
Our client has mentioned using elements of the project that we’ve created as she moves forward with her company. She prefers Squarespace for its simplicity compared to other platforms like Wordpress. She’s talked about moving her old website to our new design, and we’re optimistic about how that transition will go for her. There were certain things that we were not able to accomplish due to time constraints that she’d like to do as well, such as updating images to her own and adding all of her blog post ideas she has. We’re hopeful she’ll stick with the branding we established, and when we return to her site in a year, we envision the rescue thriving online because of our dedicated efforts to craft this new presence for her.
Links to everything you need to know:
The NEW Kindness Matters website
Capstone Presentation Video and Slides
