Mower County Humane Society: Redesigning a shelter site to drive adoption

Mower County Humane Society in Austin, Minnesota exists to place unwanted dogs and cats into responsible forever homes. But their website — the first place most adopters meet an animal — was dated, hard to navigate, and thin on the information adopters actually need to feel confident saying yes.

Our team chose this project because the stakes are concrete: every improvement to the adoption journey is an animal that doesn't get left behind.

Tools: Figma, Adobe XD, Miro

We started with four user interviews with people who had adopted or fostered, then ran a follow-up survey (16 responses) to pressure-test what we were hearing. Two themes came up over and over: the unknown history of a shelter animal, and the friction of the adoption paperwork itself.

We also interviewed Carey Sharp, Mower County's Dog Kennel Manager, to ground our work in the shelter's own reality. Her biggest concern wasn't the site — it was the people behind it.

"We don't have enough volunteers. Most that are here day to day are senior citizens — we can't get enough able-bodied regular volunteers." — Carey Sharp, Dog Kennel Manager

That single quote reshaped our scope: the redesign needed to champion volunteers as visibly as it championed adoptions.

After affinitising the interview and survey data we built our persona, Lola Johnson: a values-driven adopter who wants to give a shelter dog a home instead of buying from a breeder, but is anxious about the animal's unknown history and dreading the paperwork.

The persona we used to evaluate every design decision against.

We mapped Lola's journey from the moment she decides to adopt through bringing an animal home. The map made three opportunity areas obvious — and they became the spine of the redesign.

• Better animal profiles — give adopters the temperament and history context they need to feel confident.
• Efficient application — break the wall-of-form into something a person actually wants to finish.
• A modern, easy-to-use site — earn trust before the adopter ever fills anything out.

Lola's adoption journey, with opportunity areas marked at each friction point.

We sketched a shared direction off the research, then split the prioritised features three ways and each owned one through low, mid, and high fidelity. Every iteration was driven by the previous round of usability feedback — not by personal preference.

First-pass wireframes for the redesigned home page.

The low-to-mid fidelity screens we took into testing.

Final high-fidelity home page with the modernised look and feel.

Richer animal profile with temperament, history, and clear next steps.

We tested with animal lovers who had adopted before — the people who would actually use this site. Across rounds of moderated and 5-second tests, the same four themes kept surfacing:

• Form issues & expectations — the original application was one extremely long page; questions felt invasive and unclear.
• Site structure — important buttons were hard to find and filtering options were thin.
• Wording — application questions confused users about what was being asked and why.
• Site style — the site looked old enough that users questioned whether the listings were even current.

We responded by breaking the application into stepped sections, rewriting question copy in plain language, adding pet filters, and giving every primary action a consistent, predictable spot.

The redesigned site does four things the old one couldn't: modernised look and trust signals, animal profiles built around the questions adopters actually ask, a stepped adoption application that respects the user's time, and a visible volunteer call-to-action that responds directly to Carey's concern.

Before — the original Mower County Humane Society homepage.

After — our redesigned homepage prototype.

• Parallel ownership scales — if the research is shared. Splitting features three ways only worked because we agreed on the persona and journey first.
• Test with the actual user type. Recruiting people who had really adopted surfaced concerns (history, paperwork anxiety) that generic usability testing would have missed.
• A late stakeholder interview can still reshape the design. Carey's volunteer quote came in after we'd started prototyping and still changed what made it onto the home page.

Next steps: user accounts so adopters can save favourite animals and resume applications, plus richer filtering on the animal listings.