ABOUT

Dogs Trust is the largest dog welfare charity in the UK, each year caring for around 16,000 dogs at their nationwide network of 19 rehoming centres. When asked us to design and architect their new site, Decibel Digital leapt at the chance! Clinical UX was integral to this project, due to the multiple user journeys and functionality the site had to cater for, the main being:

Rehoming - Allowing people to search and browse the dogs, and encourage them to visit the centres

Sponsorship - Users can sponsor individual dogs or make a donation to the charity

Educate - Raising awareness around specific campaignsa and issues and providing guidance to those who already own dogs as pets.

Decibel Digital's response

One of the initial challenges we faced, was the massive amount of content on the existing site. While much of it was actually pretty useful, the way it was organised made it very hard to find. We started with a content audit to evaluate the effectiveness of each piece of content on the site, followed up with a card sorting exercise to organise what remained, in a way that was intuitive to people. The output of both these steps proved very useful leading into the prototyping and design stages. Users are now able to search for a dog via breed, size and location, through a clean and engaging interface.

This project was also an opportunity to develop their brand online; creating a new visual language and assets that could sit beside their already established brand. We kept the brand yellow, but used it as an accent colour, rather than having it dominate every page. We introduced some friendly pastel tones into their online colour palette, along with a linear icon style for the navigation. This is a site aimed at all ages, so we kept it as simple as possible: clean typography, minimal clutter and simple graphical elements which championed the content, and most importantly, the dogs.