UX/UI Design
Edmonton Humane Society
Empowering users to connect and engage
Role: Lead UX/UI Designer
Agency: Box Clever
Client: Edmonton Humane Society
Since 1907, the Edmonton Humane Society (EHS) has been providing animal welfare services in Edmonton. With a mission to enrich the lives of people and animals, EHS goes beyond adoptions offering a range of community programs, education, training, and behavioural support. Their existing website, however, struggled to clearly communicate the full scope of their offerings, provide a positive user experience, or support their growing digital needs.
As the UX design lead, my goal was to redesign the website to reflect EHS’s positive brand, improve usability, and empower the community to get involved.
Discovery & Research
Our early discovery process included extensive stakeholder interviews, user group identification, along with updated sitemap and user flow recommendations. Key insights were gained around three major user groups: potential adopters, donors, and support service users (including education seekers, pet owners, and foster/volunteer participants).
Pain points included:
An unclear navigation structure and overwhelming content structures that buried key information
Lack of clarity around EHS’s full range of services
Missed opportunities to showcase positive impact stories such as happy adoption outcomes
An underutilized homepage that wasn’t optimized to highlight real-time updates or current initiatives
User feedback emphasized the desire for a site that felt clean, welcoming, easy to use, and was reflective of EHS’s community-driven mission and vibrant personality.
Solution
The website redesign focused heavily on three main areas:
1. Simplified, Intuitive Navigation
To improve overall user experience and reduce confusion:
The navigation was restructured and redesigned with clear pathways ensuring that both first-time visitors and returning users could quickly access key content.
An updated user flow and sitemap was created to ensure information structure is clear, and content could be located easily.
2. Showcasing EHS’s Full Impact
To combat the perception that EHS is “just a rescue,” the new strategy highlights the organization's full scope of offerings:
Featured story highlights for donor, adoption, and volunteer testimonials.
Clear sections on the homepage showing the full scope of what EHS offers. This focussed not just on available pets, but also resources, events, news, courses, ways to donate, and community impact.
3. A More Engaging, Accessible Design
We embraced EHS’s positive and approachable brand and applied it to the website. This was accomplished by highlighting vibrant colour palettes and joyful photography of animals and people, while ensuring accessibility and an improved user experience. Key design enhancements included:
Sticky donate button for constant visibility.
Flexible content sections so staff can ensure content stays relevant and up to date, while being easy to update in the backend.
Improved search, tag filters, and categories throughout the site on pages such as Events, Classes & Courses, and Available Pets.
Thoughtful animations and hover states to enhance experience, usability and accessibility.
Conclusion
Through this redesign, the Edmonton Humane Society’s website has been positioned as a website that is engaging, accessible, and built for connection. The new platform not only tells a more complete story of who EHS is and the wide range of services it offers, but also makes it easier for users to find the content they are looking for and take action. With thoughtfully designed pages, custom WordPress components, and a simplified CMS experience, the EHS team can now manage content and keep their site up to date with ease.
From adopting a pet to making a donation, the new website supports the goals of the organization while providing a user-friendly experience for website visitors.
