Ideate 2021 Design Challenge
Title: UX Designer
Client: Vets to Vets United
Field: Responsive Web Design, Graphic Design, Branding
Skills: Color, Layout, Prototyping, Design thinking
Tools: Adobe XD, Google Docs
Duration: 24 hours
Context
Ideate 2021 was an online design-thinking workshop held by Duke University that culminated in a 24-hour design challenge. I teamed up with 2 other students at the conference to take on the task of redesigning the Vets to Vets United website, a non-profit organization whose goal is to pair veterans with shelter dogs to improve veterans' lives through companionship and/or aid with mental or physical disabilities as well as save dogs from local animal shelters.
Interviews
After several interviews with the Executive Director and Founder of the organization, Dr. Terry Morris, our team identified the overarching issues faced by the organization that the website needed to address:
- Long waitlist for veterans to be paired with dogs
- largely because there are too few veterinary volunteers and dog trainers
Original Website
Problem Overview & Current User Journey
Buried Information & Missing Call to Action
The need for veterinarians isn’t mentioned in the volunteering or veterinarian sections, and pertinent volunteer information is buried from the user within the website. Different kinds of volunteer opportunities are relegated to different sections of the website, making it difficult for users to see all of the volunteer opportunities available.
Overwhelming Menu and Text
The website's navigation is overloaded with subsections that make it unclear for users to connect what links lead to what information. The large amount of text on each page is overwhelming for the user to dig through in order to find information about volunteering and supporting the organization.
Goal
Fixing the bottleneck in volunteer resources (especially professional volunteers) by prioritizing the call for volunteers and consolidating the information on the website into clearer, concise categories.
Ideate
The "sticky note" phase of our process where we brainstormed the specific elements of our plan to restructure the website. Because team members were based in different parts of the world, we collaborated through google docs.
Our Solution
High-Fidelity Prototype
Mockup of signage to use at events in order to direct people to the website
