ASPCA ProLearning (ASPCApro) has built its brand on providing services to professionals working in a variety of animal-related professions, from shelter and rescue workers and volunteers, to veterinary, law enforcement, and equine care professionals.
Why Echo&Co?
ASPCApro asked us to help them better understand the needs and motivations of their users and to develop a roadmap for strategic, incremental improvements to their website over time. To start them on this new way of thinking and working, this project began with a formal usability testing phase. We spent several weeks in discovery and test-plan development with ASPCApro to design the right test methodology. Using The Human Factors International guidelines for testing, we recruited 16 real end-users from among their constituents who represented a cross-section of shelter, rescue, and veterinary professions working in canine, feline, and equine programs. We conducted the tests over the course of two weeks.
User Research & Usability Testing
Deciding what to fix
Valuable content was driving engagement, but it was buried in an information architecture (IA) that was not simple or intuitive. We identified and prioritized short-term, tactical areas for improvement to the IA and moved into a planning cycle for implementation and release.
Tracking the right goals
Users were coming to the website with various time and behavioral constraints, based on their specific reason for visiting the site, and the user experience (UX) was not structured to help them easily plan their activities and find their intended content based on their unique needs. Based on our recommendations, ASPCApro implemented key performance indicators (KPIs) for the first time, against which we are tracking site behavior in order to ground future enhancements in research and insights.
At the end of this project, ASPCApro gained a focused, strategic methodology in-house for quantitative and qualitative evaluation of performance and prioritization of feature enhancements. Based on our recommendations, they also implemented key performance indicators for the first time, against which we are tracking site behavior in order to ground future enhancements in insights. This is a new discipline for digital strategy internally that the organization has never had. We are now beginning a new project with ASPCApro on a full platform redesign.
