Redesigned the ASPCA adoption experience around richer pet profiles, lifestyle-based search, and a unified application flow so potential adopters can make confident decisions without restarting across shelter sites.
Time Span: 8 Weeks
Category: Animal Welfare
Role: UI/UX Designer
CONTEXT
The ASPCA's website is often the first place potential adopters go when looking for a pet. However, adoption is not browsing; people need enough context to picture an animal in their home, understand its needs, and feel confident before reaching out to a shelter. People need enough context to picture an animal in their home, understand its care needs, and feel genuinely confident before reaching out to a shelter. When that experience falls short, the cost isn't just a negative experience; it's a motivated person walking away, and an animal that stays in a shelter longer than it needs to.
The existing experience put the burden on the adopter. Pet profiles offered little more than a single photo and a vague personality blurb, leaving users without the information they needed to evaluate whether an animal was actually a good fit for their home, schedule, or lifestyle. Search didn't help either, results were too broad to filter by anything meaningful, making it easy to scroll past animals that could have been the right match.
The application process made it worse. Instead of guiding users through one consistent flow, the ASPCA handed adopters off to individual shelter sites mid-process: where they had to start over, fill out the same information again, and hope for a response. For someone interested in more than one animal, the repetition was enough to cause drop-off entirely.
Three breakdowns defined the problem: profiles lacked trustworthy detail, search ignored lifestyle fit, and the application process punished people for considering more than one pet. Users leaving weren't disinterest as they were motivated adopters who ran out of patience with a process that wasn't built to support them.
SOLUTION
Each breakdown from the research became a design pillar.
The pet profile was redesigned as a decision-making tool rather than a simple listing. Multiple high-quality photos, medical history, vaccination records, compatibility notes, and complete shelter information work together to reduce ambiguity before users commit to the next step.
Search was rebuilt around lifestyle fit rather than generic browsing. Filters for species, breed, age, size, behavior, and keywords let users narrow results based on real constraints, such as apartment living, a busy schedule, or a specific level of care.
The fragmented application pattern was replaced with a unified flow inside the ASPCA platform. A single application pulls from a shared profile, avoiding the need for adopters to repeat the same form across shelters and making the application feel like a continuation of the search experience rather than a restart.
OUTCOME
Testing the prototype with users revealed a consistent pattern: the more detail a profile contained, the more confident users felt about taking the next step. Participants responded most strongly to the behavioral details, structured layout, and reusable application.
"This new website really helps narrow things down, it was really hard to figure out which pet works with me before."
"Having more consistent photos would have saved me so much time and heartbreak."
"The experience seems a lot better because you can save your application and keep using it instead of filling it out again and again."These responses reinforced the core goal of the redesign: a clearer adoption experience can reduce uncertainty before the application stage, helping motivated users feel ready to take the next step.
Going into this project, I assumed the biggest barrier to adoption was that people were unsure about the commitment. What the research actually showed was that the barrier was informational. People were ready to commit but the experience just wasn't giving them enough to commit to.
That reframe shaped every decision. Instead of designing for motivation, we designed for confidence, making sure each part of the profile answered a real question an adopter would have before moving forward.
If I continued this project, I'd want to go deeper on two things: how users evaluate and compare multiple animals at once, and how shelters handle the applications coming in on the other side. The adopter experience and the shelter workflow are two halves of the same system, and a redesign that only solves for one of them isn't fully solving the problem.
