ALEXIS MILLER
PORTAL FOR ANIMAL WELLNESS SUPPORT
Social Impact & Service Design
A centralized dashboard for discovering urgent animal shelter needs, donations, and volunteer opportunities
Project Overview
This project addresses a critical gap in the animal welfare ecosystem: while shelters and rescues rely heavily on donations, there is no centralized way for individuals to see which resources are most urgently needed across facilities in Indiana. The level of funding and donations directly impacts how effectively shelters can care for animals and place them in permanent homes.
To address this, I designed a solution focused on increasing awareness, improving access to information, and driving more targeted support for animal shelters and rescues.
For this project, I applied principles of human-computer interaction, design thinking, and transmedia storytelling to create a cohesive, user-centered experience. The final deliverables included a mid-fidelity website prototype called the Portal for Animal Wellness Support (PAWS), along with a supporting social media campaign and a comprehensive research paper documenting the literature review, design process, and formative usability testing.
Tools
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Figma
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Qualtrics
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Dovetail
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Miro
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Adobe Express
Impact & Key Findings
100% task completion rate across key support actions, including finding events, identifying urgent donation needs, and locating volunteer opportunities
Heat map visualization enabled instant identification of high-need shelters, allowing users to prioritize where support was most urgently required
Users located urgent donation needs quickly without browsing multiple listings or pages
Participants reported high confidence in understanding where and how to help
Centralized donation and volunteering platform eliminated the need to visit multiple websites, allowing users to access donations, volunteering, adoption, and events in one place
Reduced time and effort required to find ways to support shelters by consolidating fragmented information into a single decision-support interface
Research
Usability Testing
Task-based usability testing was conducted using the pet donation dashboard prototype to evaluate how easily users could locate urgent needs and take action.
Participants completed realistic support scenarios:
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Find an upcoming animal rescue event
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Identify shelters with urgent donation needs
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Learn how to help or volunteer
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Locate adoptable animals
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Share information on social media
Testing measured navigation clarity, task completion, decision-making speed, and the effectiveness of heat map data visualization in guiding user decisions.
The Design Thinking Process
Empathy Research
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What is the problem?
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When does the problem occur?
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Who is having this problem?
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Conduct User Interview and surveys
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Saturate & Group
Define
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Identify goals, needs, wants
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Identify specific problems
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Identify key behaviors and attitudes
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User Journeys
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Personas
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Affinity Diagrams
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"How Might We..." statements
Ideate
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Brainstorming sessions
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Storyboarding
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Developing MANY ideas
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Rough layouts and sketches
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Communicating what is and isn't possible.
Prototype
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Wireframes
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Prototypes
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Ensuring the prototype meets users' needs
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User flows
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Accessibility
Test
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Usability Testing
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A/B Testing
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Quantitative analysis
Mid-Fidelity Prototype Walkthrough
Formative testing resulted in adjustments to the PAWS Dashboard:
simplified text layout
re-organized content
clear, more accessible, navigation links
Social Media Campaign
A social media campaign was created through a series of three different types of social media post concepts designed to illustrate what potential photos from Instagram and Facebook would consist of.
The PAWS social media campaign consists of three main messages:
Current animal
shelter trends
How you can help
Success stories
How you can help messages would be displayed through the use of urgent donation needs that have been requested along with graphics that tell if a shelter or rescue is at capacity. Graphics would also use maps to display locations currently offering low-cost clinics, microchipping, or shelters that need donations and volunteers. Success story messages would be displayed through photos from adoption clinics, volunteering events, and other photos showing donations given to shelters and how they are being used.
Key Takeaways
This project demonstrates my ability to design a human-centered donation dashboard that transforms fragmented animal shelter data into clear, actionable opportunities for support. By prioritizing information hierarchy, visual clarity, and centralized access, I enabled users to quickly identify urgent needs, discover events, and engage with volunteering opportunities without unnecessary friction. Features like heat map visualizations and consolidated listings reduced the time and effort required to take meaningful action, resulting in a 100% task completion rate and high user confidence. The outcome is an intuitive, decision-support experience that increases awareness, streamlines giving, and helps direct critical resources to animal shelters and rescues where they are needed most.