Greater Vancouver Zoo cover photo showing multiple frames.

Project Overview

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Role:

Product Designer

Duration:

1 week

Objective:

The primary objective of this project was to ensure the zoo's website was optimized for the main user goals including purchasing tickets, viewing animal exhibits, checking opening hours and zoo information, and accessing educational resources. I aimed to improve the overall user experience by making these tasks more intuitive and user-friendly.

Strategy:

The usability testing revealed several areas where the website was falling short. While tasks were doable, they were not as user-friendly as they could be, leading to negative interactions and a decrease in satisfaction among participants. My goal in this project was to streamline these processes and to make sure that all tasks are easy to accomplish.

What's the problem?

After conducting 10 interviews, there were a couple issues affecting the user experience of the website. The three main challenges were:

  • CTAs were too overwhelming, and they often competed for attention with eachother
  • Navigating the website was confusing
  • The text was hard to read as it frequently changed layouts throughout the website

Based on these findings, I decided to redesign the main pages and page components to address these specific issues.

Goals

Making the site more digestable and user-friendly was the main goal of this project. To ensure that the users can easily navigate and achieve their goals, I needed to:

1Simplify and prioritize CTAs

2Reorganize the navigation menu for better clarity

3Enhance text readability

Design Process

Research and testing

I conducted interviews with 10 local participants to gather insights before initiating the design.

The participants were made to perform tasks aligned with the website's primary goals such as finding zoo information (e.g., opening hours, location, animals in the exhibit, membership benefits), purchasing tickets, and planning a visit to the zoo.

Task one: Find opening hours and location.

Task two: Purchase a ticket.

Task three: Get the zoo's contact information.

Task four: Discover membership benefits.

Task five: Plan a visit.

After the tasks, the participants were asked follow up questions to evaluate their experience with these tasks and overall impression of the website.

Question one: Can you describe navigating the zoo's website?

Question two: Are there any aspects of the zoo's website that you particularly like or think could be improved?

Question three: Can you recall a memorable experience on the zoo's website? What aspects made it stand out for you?

Identifying key issues

A list of concerns and challenges were compiled based on the participant feedback, which identified a few key issues.

  1. Poor readability
    • 6 participants mentioned the text was hard to read due to the different text layouts.
    • 5 mentioned that the text made it difficult to distinguish between what's important and what is not at first glance.
    • 1 mentioned that there was too much to read at once.
  2. Hard to navigate
    • 7 participants talked about how navigating the website confused them when trying to complete tasks.
    • 4 mentioned that the navigation bar didn't make sense, and that there were too many repeating things.
  3. Too many CTAs competing for attention.
    • Like before with the text, 5 participants couldn't distinguish between what was important and what wasn't.
    • 5 participants thought the CTAs were not enticing.

Addressing these key issues were a priority in the redesign.

Finding solutions

Once the results were analyzed and key issues identified, similar zoos in Canada were studied to explore effective solutions or alternative approaches they had successfully implemented.

Implementation

Call to actions - The main page's CTAs were restructured, categorized by priority to minimize user overwhelm.

Picture showing how the main page's hero CTA were changed. CTAs more organized.
Picture showing how the main page's main CTAs were changed.

Navigation - Reorganized to enhance intuitiveness and ease of use.

Shows the changing of the organization of the navigation bar and footer.
Picture displays the changes between the ticket pages, the format of the buying tickets changing to be more streamlined and easy to follow.

Membership page - Revamped with improved readability and more compelling content to attract potential members.

Picture displays the changes between the membership offers, making them more routine and readable.
Picture showing a more organized list of zoo parents, and sorted by the different tiers that they've bought.

Hi-fidelity Mockups

Picture shows two page mockups, including the home and ticket page.
Picture shows page mockups, including the zoo parent page

Results

I reviewed the redesigned website with the same 10 participants to evaluate the changes. Eight out of ten participants found the new design much easier to use, one participant found it acceptable, and the last participant liked both versions equally.

The redesign effectively met the goals that we set, resulting in a more user friendly website.