Overview
A redesign of the Constellation Cat Café website highlighting a welcoming and playful design with improved navigation and an intuitive booking system. Key features include sections for adoption services, café details, and upcoming events, all designed to enhance usability while reflecting the café’s charming and community-driven atmosphere. The design prioritizes accessibility and ensures a seamless user experience that resonates with the café's unique personality.
Role: Lead Designer
Timeline: 3 weeks
Tools:
How can the Constellation Cat Café website provide a seamless experience for visitors, improve the adoption process, and increase engagement?
Analysis of The Current Design
The homepage of the Constellation Cat Café displays a cluttered design, particularly in how hours and options are displayed. The four-block grid layout creates a rigid structure that feels disconnected and can confuse users, hindering intuitive navigation. Simplifying this would enhance the user experience.
A redesign of the Constellation Cat Café website highlighting a welcoming and playful design with improved navigation and an intuitive booking system. Key features include sections for adoption services, café details, and upcoming events, all designed to enhance usability while reflecting the café’s charming and community-driven atmosphere. The design prioritizes accessibility and ensures a seamless user experience that resonates with the café's unique personality.
Having users navigate to Instagram to view new available cats is not ideal because it requires extra steps, disrupting the user flow. It forces visitors to leave the website and go to an external platform, which could lead to frustration and loss of engagement. Keeping this information on it's own page would provide a more seamless experience and allow users to quickly see what’s available without needing to switch contexts. This would improve user retention and convenience.
The large photos on the About and Booking pages are unnecessary and disruptive. They waste prime space, delaying access to key content, and add no value to the user’s tasks. They also slow load times and break visual flow, making navigation awkward. Smaller, relevant visuals would improve usability.
The booking page has awkward spacing that may confuse the user and also leads to a lot of blank space that increases scrolling. The pictures on the "Cat Room" selections feature designs or pictures with different styles or mediums that lead to a tacky and inconsistent appearence.
User Painpoints
Wireframing
This wireframe outlines a proposed redesign for the Constellation Cat Café website, focusing on usability and user priorities identified during research. Key improvements include:
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Streamlined Navigation: Simplified menus for quicker access to key sections like booking, adoption, and FAQs.
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Content Hierarchy: Concise, scannable text paired with relevant visuals to prioritize user tasks.
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Optimized Booking Process: A more intuitive layout for scheduling visits with clear availability indicators.
Website Redesign
Goals: Accesibility, Clarity, Streamline Content
The redesigned homepage features a cleaner design that has a clear visual pathway with a more simplified navigation while still keeping all of the styling and branding.
Providing a dedicated Available Cats page is more accessible than making users go to the Instagram as it centralizes information, eliminates the need for social media, supports accessibility features like screen readers, and allows for better search and filtering. It also presents the cats professionally, enhancing user experience and connecting adopters more effectively.
The new booking page allows users to book on the site directly and keeps a consistent design style with a better usage of white space and improved text spacing.
Takeaways
This project reinforced the importance of user-centered design, simplicity, and clear navigation in creating a positive web experience. By aligning the website's design with Constellation Cat Café's brand identity, using a cohesive color palette, and prioritizing mobile responsiveness, I was able to create a more user-friendly, accessible site. The iterative design process and continuous feedback helped refine the site to meet both user needs and business goals, demonstrating how thoughtful design choices can significantly impact engagement and usability.