The Donkey Sanctuary

Transforming the quality of life for donkeys, mules and people worldwide through greater understanding, collaboration and support, and by promoting lasting, mutually life-enhancing relationships.

Design discovery

We kicked off the design process with a creative positioning meeting, this involved us going through brand guidelines, existing documents, key competitor websites, and other websites of interest to gauge what the tone and feel of the new website should be. From there we started producing design experiments, that were continuously shared with the client, from these were were able to form a solid foundation and design brief that our concept would be based on.

The concept

Together with the client we choose three key page templates that should be worked up, these were iterated on until we had a concept that was polished enough to user test. We recruited existing and potential users to partake in testing, this tests were ran by myself and a user experience research down at the Donkey Sanctuary in Sidmouth, Devon. The day was a great success, and we came away with lots of new insights and a list of potential changes. These changed were analysed and implemented, forming a signed off design concept.

Adoption and shopping experience

Alongside their webcams, the adoption and shopping experience is a extremely popular, high traffic area of the site. On their existing site it was a pretty simple affair, that was confusing users who wanted to purchase multiple items. With this in mind we suggested a new setup, that would allow seamless transactions for users that wanted a donkey mug, whilst also adopting Ashley the donkey for their Gran. These journeys were mapped out, ensuring that even if the user wanted to buy their mug with their credit card, and adopt the donkey via direct debit, it would all make sense to the user. From there page designs were created for each step of the process, then passed onto the development team to implement in the Drupal content management system.

Going live

The website launched in early May, and while the most popular pages are still the donkey webcams, they’re getting a lot less calls asking for help with the adoption and checkout process.

This work was completed whilst working as Senior User Experience Designer & UI Developer at Torchbox

https://www.thedonkeysanctuary.org.uk/

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