A UX Case Study Part 1 — Re-design a non-profit organization (Cause for Animals)

Contributors: Ain Sahimi and Grace Esther Susilo

Toolkit — Pen, Paper, Business Model Canvas, Lean Survey Canvas, Google Forms, Value Proposition Canvas, Miro
UX Techniques — Business Analysis, Survey, Desk Research, Proto-persona, User Stories, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Interface Design, Navigation Design, Information Design, Sensory Design, Solutions

In this case study, we will cover the research and findings through Lean UX and unravel the successful methods used in many organizations today.

Overview of the Non-Profit Organization

Causes for Animals (Singapore) Limited (CAS) is an animal welfare charity set up and registered in 2013 to support the needs of local animal welfare in Singapore. CAS employs programmes and policies to promote best practice involving ethical, sustainable and compassionate treatment of these animals.

• Mission: CAS believes that working hand in hand with other organizations is vital and most importantly, the best means to benefit local street dogs and cats
• Value: that companion animals are a product of human intervention and that we have a special obligation to them in regard to humane treatment and responsible stewardship

The five elements of UX

According to Jesse James Garrett, co-founder of Adaptive Path (Strategy and Design Consulting firm), the following are the 5 elements of User Experience Design

• Strategy
• Scope
• Structure
• Skeleton
• Surface

Each level builds on the level before it, and they start with an abstract level towards concrete one(from bottom to top).

For the first part of this case study, we will only be covering strategy, scope, and structure.

The strategy plane

Business Goals

A great digital product is when the business and the user goals are intercepted. With that, we discussed and created an assumption on what we think might be a good business and user goal for Cause for Animals. Moving on, one must not forget the usefulness, usability and desirability of the product itself. All of these when applied will make a great product — extra great!

The Business Model Canvas

We proceeded on creating the Business Model Canvas for Cause for Animals (CAS). What is it anyway? A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures its values. By using hypothesis, it helps us identify how CAS works from a whole business point of view.

Who are CAS’s customer segments?

• Local Society
• Individual customers interested in adopting animals
• People looking for lost animals/pets
• People leaving animals in the shelter

What is CAS’s value proposition?

• Rescue domesticated animals and give the voiceless a forever home.
• “Adopt, don’t shop” mentality. Benefits of adopting vs buying a pet. Lower cost = same amount of love. Advocate the cause.
• Feel complete and give love and to be loved.

What are the channels that CAS uses to reach its customers?

• Online
• Social Media
• Online Donations
• Events promoting volunteering work and adoption

What are the types of relationships that CAS offers to its customers?

• Community
• Networking Events
• Food Drives
• Annual Flag Day
• Education Programs

Where did CAS get its revenue streams from?

• Donations
• Volunteers
• Pet Adoptions

What are CAS key resources to run its business?

• Volunteers
• Space
• Administrative
• Operations

What are the key activities CAS must do to make its business model work?

• Marketing
• Campaigns
• Events
• Education for the public
• Training
• Networking
• Before and after services

Who are the key partnerships to continue running CAS?

• Strategic alliances between non-competitors
• Vet/doctors
• Established artists selling animal artwork and split the profit
• Rescue organizations
• Printing companies — Print animal calendars
• Cause Marketing Alliances — Digital design houses that could provide a lower price plan or for free
• Advocacy Alliances — Adoption Community
• Buyer-Supplier relationships to assure reliable supplies — Pet grooming establishments. Pet food and accessories suppliers
• Low or high-end donors — From the public or organizations

What is the cost structure in order for CAS to operate its business?

• High-cost
• Food, vet and medication, housing for the strays are inherent and the most expensive.
• Volunteers are most welcomed and appreciated

Lean UX approach

Lean UX — What is it?

Lean UX begins with the idea that everything is an assumption until we prove otherwise. In Lean UX, we are trying above all to create a meaningful and measurable change in customer behavior. The ultimate goal is improved outcomes; hence, anything that doesn’t contribute to that is considered waste and should be removed.

Lean UX emphasizes on the three of the following,

• Removing waste — The system seeks to cut through common, time-consuming tactics like frequent documentation by creating minimal viable products that drive learning quickly.
• Constant collaboration — Lean UX brings together teams from “designers, developers, product managers, quality assurance engineers, marketers, and others” through frequent contact and communication.
• More experimentation — Designers leverage rapid experimentation with their designs to uncover more grounded information and lessons on their products.

In the next few steps, read through on how we create the assumptions based on the research obtained and how we validate it.

Product Objective

Cause for Animals has been around since 2013 and it has many successful campaigns and volunteer support running multiple programmes to help their beneficiaries.

The challenge was to explore how they could continue using their website to achieve more donations to continue its mission and vision.

The website is used as a medium to attract potential donors, volunteering work and increase adoptions through multiple media campaigns and public awareness.

We want to be part of a community with wider acceptance of companion animals with humane animal management policies. Our ultimate aim is to strive towards a Stray free country — Cause for Animals Singapore

User needs — Proto Persona

Next, we tried to form an understanding of the website’s target and created a Proto-Persona to define her goals. Through Lean UX Approach, we created an assumption that this Proto-Persona is the target audience which CAS will be targeting. We included the tasks and a significant moment (highlighted in yellow) that leads the persona and the business in achieving their goal.

Lean Survey Canvas

To validate the Proto-persona, we created a Lean Survey Canvas to deeper understand the needs of CAS and create an appropriate and useful survey that will be used to obtain findings.

Survey Questions

We then proceeded on with creating the survey questions and interviewed 5 people with different nationalities and backgrounds.

The survey questions that we asked can be found below;

• Are you thinking about getting a pet?
• Would you consider adopting a pet or buying from a pet store or a breeder?
• Where would you go if you have decided to adopt a pet?
• What is appealing to you in buying a pet rather than adopting?
• Have you heard about animal fostering?
• Would you volunteer to pet shelters?
• Have you donated to pet shelters before?
• Why have/haven’t you?
• How was the overall experience when you were adopting your pet?
• Do you face any difficulties when you first adopt your pet?
• Did you get support or an aftercare from the organizations where you adopt or bought the pet from?
• What do you hope to see or improve to let you have a better experience with the organization or individuals whom you adopted your pet from?

Survey Findings

The interviews have helped us to better comprehend their understanding, needs and pains. With all the consolidated answers, we received honest unexpected results that could be used as a base for us to pursue.

The data obtained shows a high percentage of customers who have not donated or heard of animal fostering. However, more than half are willing to volunteer. What intrigues us most are the feedback they gave when they started to open up

This is something we found could aid us in understanding the customer’s needs and felt that it could not be ignored.

Re-defined Persona

From our findings, we proceeded on with re-defining the Proto-persona. We realize that there’s not much that we want to change and that the interviews have proved to be a source to back our assumptions. We completed the re-defined persona with opportunities of how we could help users like the persona created, reach its goal.

The scope plane

Moving to the scope plane. This step is where we split between the product as a vehicle for functionality and product as the information medium.

Product Objective

After going through assumptions and research in the Strategy plane, we are then able to understand the business goals and the user needs. We used the Value Proposition Canvas to help determine features that will help the website achieve Product-Market fit.

Lean UX Hypothesis Table

After understanding between the business goals and the user needs, we each filled up information which aligned with business goals and the user needs into Lean UX Hypothesis table before we formed them into a hypothesis statement.

Feature Hypothesis Statement

Hypothesis statement cover the business outcomes, users, user outcomes and features:

User Stories

Using the Agile methods to translate our hypothesis, then using the MoSCoW framework then breaking down priorities of our User Stories.

Now it’s time for us to prioritize them. Since in Lean UX there’s many different hypothesis, it’s impossible to test everything therefore we have to narrow down on which features to test first. We use the Effort/Impact scale to prioritize based on business perspective. And we also use the MosCow method to prioritize based on the user’s perspective.

The goal is to find features with high impact and low effort.

MoSCow Sorting for Features

By using the MosCow Sorting, we then are able narrow it down to three features that we want to work on first. The three features include:

1. Filter feature for adopters to choose their animals
2. Show feature success stories for adopted pets
3. “Adopt a pet instead of buying” message at the homepage should show first before the user scrolls.

Content Inventory

We listed out all the current pages with the attributes including numbering system, navigation title, page title, URL and comments in Cause For Animals website and created a content inventory in Google Sheet. By doing this actually allows us to take an overall look at all the pages.

Content Audit

Content audit is where we can determine if we should leave the content as it is or update it or even remove it. Since we focus more on encouraging users to adopt more, we decided to combine all the animals adoption tabs into a single page. This allows the user to easily browse through instead of going to individual tabs. And also we added a new menu (Blogs and Resources) where we combine related pages that fit the Blogs and Resources tab into a single page.

Content Framing

Before organizing the current sitemaps, we did content framing of CauseForAnimals homepage. We focused on the homepage as its user’s first point of contact with the organization. By doing content framing is to allow us to discover the goal for each page and how to effectively increase people’s. Here’s an example of content framing that we did for CauseForAnimals Homepage. Listing from the most important that the user wants to see to the least important user cares.

Example of Content Framing

The Structure Plane

Next, we continued on to the next plane, the structure plane. This is the point at which our concern shifts from the more abstract issues of strategy and scope to the concrete factors that will determine what users finally experience.

Interaction Design

In order to improve the connection between user and site, we had to look at the 5 dimensions of interaction design for Cause For Animals website.

1. Words — Click on images that mislead users to click but nothing can be clicked.

Un-clickable image that might confuse the user

2. Visual Representation — In consistency of the text size and images are small in size that might be hard for user to see

Left: Inconsistency of font size, Right: Small image and unable to expand to view

3. Physical Objects — Users can’t see Mobile site hamburger menu due to text color and users have to scroll in order to see the content below the categories section as it takes up the whole screen.

Left: Hamburger Menu, Right: Category section. Taken from Iphone Xs

4. Time — Can be during commuting to work or during night time before heading to bed.

5. Behaviour — Under the what we do tab is a list of CTA buttons that leads to another page. This might confuse users as they can actually go to the individual tab to look for what they need instead of taking an extra click.

Information Architecture

After content framing was done, we then conducted an open card sorting with 3 users to evaluate the information architecture of the site. This is where we categories and helps arrange content on the website. To ensure that users can directly look for the information they need instead of looking through all the individual pages. Some changes from card sorting were:

1. Merging “Dogs for Adoptions”, “HDB Approved”, “Cats for Adoption”, “Cats Adoption Process” and “Adoption charges” into one single page with a filter feature.
2. Split tabs under the “Donations & Support” tab in two different tabs. Tabs under “What we do” will have “Stray Management”, “Community Care”, “CAS Education Programme”, Medic Aid”, “Food Drives” and "Adoptions Center”. Tab under “Blogs & Resources”, will have “Gone to good homes”, “Dogs around the world”, “Past Friends”, “Tips on Strays”, and “Pet Care”.
3. Merge “General Donation”, “Fund Raising”, “Medic Aid Cases” , “Puppy Club”, “Help a street dog”, “CAS Street Dogs”, Sponsor a Kennel Space” into 1 page under “Ways to donate tab”
4. “Community Care”, “R&R Fund Appeals”, “CNY 2021 Appeal T”, “CNY 2021 Appeal Intro” to go under a new tab called “Appeals”

New Information Architecture

Follow me in the next continuation of the case study where we will cover the skeleton and the surface part of UX, turning our research into a successful digital product!