Before I began designing, ideating, or even researching my users, I wanted to ensure that the entire process was rooted in responsible adoption policies. All of Adoptally's design solutions are rooted in the recommendations of the Rescue Group Best Practices Guide published in collaboration with the Humane Society of America and PetSmart Charities.

I chose to conduct a competitive audit to further understand how existing Rescues were utilizing the above techniques from the "Best Practices Guide." I focused on two Rescues in the Pacific Northwest area (where my fictional Rescue is located), as well as a popular adoption aggregator, Petfinder.com.

Once I had a grasp on responsible adoption policies, I I identified two groups of users that would be able to provide valuable feedback: those who have recently adopted a dog (having gone through the process from beginning to end), and those who were thinking of adopting a dog (just starting out in the process).

One interesting finding from these interviews is that participants often expressed a desire for more restrictive barriers to adoption, such as lengthy pre-adoption forms or applications. This conveyed to adopters that a Rescue was responsible and took care to find the right home for a pet.​

However, these types of barriers are actually counter to the "Best Practices Guide" mentioned above. Not to mention that restrictive barriers are decidedly not very user friendly.

I developed three different Personas based on potential adopters that were at different stages of their lives. It was important to me to capture the different needs of a user depending on what type of household they maintained - whether it be in a multi-family home, an empty nester, or a first-time pet owner.

Because I was looking at the entire user experience from the beginning of their journey, it was important to frame these personas from the perspective that they are just starting out with the exploration phase.

With my three Personas in tow, I began crafting problem statements that would summarize the needs of each user.​

These statements address two main problems that I wanted to solve in my designs: 1) Users feeling unprepared or overwhelmed with the adoption process & pet ownership in general, and 2) Users feeling unconfident that a specific pet will meet their household's needs.

Now that I had a clear understanding of my users and what their problems are, I wanted to do a quick "Crazy Eights" exercise to see if I could come up with any out of the box ideas. ​The most notable idea to make it into the Adoptally infrastructure is the final one - a quiz to help users determine if they are ready for adoption. This optional quiz could function in place of a lengthy form that would otherwise be a barrier to adoption.

The IA for this adoption site did not need to be complex, so I opted for a hierarchical structure. The key was ensuring that each dog had a separate profile that could be easily found & accessed throughout the site.

I decided to focus my time and attention on three branches: the Adopter Profile, the dog profiles, and the appointment booking system (for classes or pre-adoption visits).​

Even though pages such as 'Dog Care Tips' & the 'Adoption Quiz' spoke directly to one of my targeted goals (i.e., preparing users for adoption), I determined that the content required for those pages would need to be co-developed with an industry professional. For this reason I left them out of the scope of my initial designs until I could collaborate with someone qualified in the adoption field.

My next step was to take my Low-Fi Prototype and test it. Similar to my original research, I contacted both people who had already gone through the dog adoption process, as well as those who do not currently own any pets.​

The video to the right is a screen recording of one such participant moving through the tasks of the study.

In order to build the above Mockups I also saved my work to a simple design system, including typeface, color patterns, and common components.

​I chose colors that were intended to inspire the user to complete an adoption: Reds and pinks were chosen to evoke compassion for the dogs, and yellow was chosen as a highlight to draw out a perceived happiness with their future pet. However I wanted a more natural color, green, for my Primary to tame those more evocative highlight colors.​

For the typeface I wanted to keep things fun and simple. Arvo's rounded serifs bring a joyful feeling to the user without sacrificing legibility.

Finally, I'd like to address the accessibility considerations that I took when designing Adoptally. As should be expected, all color contrasts are rated for WCAG AAA compliance. Additionally, adopter preferences for matching can be set based on if a dog is good with either Physical Disabilities or Cognitive Disabilities.