Santa Ana Zoo Redesign
“The Santa Ana Zoo through fun, adventure and learning, empowers the community to save wildlife and wild spaces.”
The Santa Ana Zoo website provides extensive information regarding ticket prices, hours of operation and many extra services the zoo
offers.
Although the website is outdated, I was ready to tackle some of the usability issues they were having trouble with. We wanted to help a local non-profit prosper with our modern take on the site.
Organization Insight
Organization
Designer
Ensuring what the organization wanted is an important factor we had to consider when starting our redesign. I was able to contact an employee about their website and focus on some accessibility and usability issues they were hoping to improve.
Organization
“The main objective for our site is to provide information for guests to visit the zoo (hours, pricing, location), what they can do/see (animals, animal info, attractions, events), and how they can help us save wildlife and wild spaces (from our mission statement, through volunteering, donating and otherwise getting involved)”
“YES! Accessibility is a problem… the site is not mobile-friendly, the auto-play music and busy background are overloading and you can’t even get to the zoo map easily or interact with it (zoom in, click on animals, etc).”
Survey and Research
As a designer we work mutually to ease the client and their users. As the median, I sent surveys and asked some questions about what users wanted to see and what interests them the most.
Whether it be a busy weekend or having trouble parking, we realized that our users have difficulty locating standard zoo information. From parking to hours of operation, we focused on emphasizing on improving accessibility to zoo information for users.
User Persona
After interviewing and running some surveys on a group of locals, these are the personas we were able to create for the user base.
We believe the local community of education and non profit leaders really want to preserve the life that the zoo provides for the animals. The personas created are to represent the people that have a passion for educating the local neighborhoods about the animals and what we can do to preserve their future.
Information Architecture
Organizing the information was an essential task that needed improvements. Rearranging and simplifying the navigation bar was crucial for users to easily search for specific zoo information.
We improved the architecture by creating an easier navigation bar that will direct users to the most important information to them (hours of operation, tickets, and etc.).
User Flow
Our team created a user flow that focused on improving each part of navigating through buying tickets and contributing by donations to the zoo.
Prioritizing how the user navigates to purchasing tickets was one of our main goals to focus on when providing the first plans for prototyping. Our goal was to minimize clicks to ticket purchasing and confirmation while maximizing on clear and distinct call to actions on each page.
Style Tile
Zoo
Nature
Wildlife
Fun
Wireframing
During our wireframing phase, we focused on two different user flows. We wanted to make the ticket purchasing process as well as the donation process an easy and reliable experience.
Some key factors we prioritized as we thought about our next steps into wireframing.
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Easy payment process.
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Clear confirmation by email.
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Reliability and transparent information.
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Responsive design and mobile-friendly.
High Fidelity Wireframes
As we started to implement our style tile and inspiration into our High Fidelity Mockups, we looked into making sure our wireframes were ready for both mobile users and for desktop users.
We understand the importance of mobile-first design and wanted to maximize the space with the most important zoo information.
Desktop Mockups
Before and After
Mobile and Desktop Prototypes
We continued creating several pages to produce a prototype that will help us understand what real complications users might face when navigating.
The goal is to identify any usability problems, collect qualitative and quantitative data and determine the participant's satisfaction with the website.
Some of the things we wanted to keep in mind while we created the prototypes were:
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Navigation to ticket page.
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Navigation to donation page.
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Test the new navigation.
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To find any broken links based on the user flow.
Click the links to view prototypes!
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Future Focus
One of the great experiences of a redesign is seeing it come to life with the whole experience.
As we move forward there are other key features that would we love to focus on and help improve for a local non-profit.
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Redesign the map and make it an important feature of the website. Interactive map help the visitors to find where to see the animals that I like easier.
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Adding a social sharing forum for the visitors to share their experience. It also helps the zoo to get visitor’s feedbacks and make the zoo a better place.
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Redesign other pages of the zoo website.
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Working on membership pages.