San Diego Zoo
Visitor-centric Homepage Redesign
User Research / Wireframing / Prototyping / Visual + UX Design Lead / Brand Strategy / Art Direction
The San Diego Zoo has Inspired and Amazed Visitors for Over a Century.
The San Diego Zoo in Balboa Park, San Diego, California, is a wildlife lover’s dream, housing more than 3,500 amazing animals and offering once-in-a-lifetime behind-the-scenes educational experiences. With more than 4 million visitors yearly, San Diego Zoo is the most visited zoo in the United States.
As expected, these visitors are looking to the San Diego Zoo’s website for all of their visitation needs: everything from buying admission tickets to deciding where to grab a quick bite. I needed to transform the existing website’s homepage into one that would better serve people planning to visit the San Diego Zoo.
Understanding the User
User Research:
Research was conducted using a combination of online surveys, in-person user interviews, meetings with Customer Service/Call Center team members for their insights, and site use analytics.
Findings:
In general, visitors were coming to the site homepage to take very specific actions:
Decide whether to visit the San Diego Zoo
Buy admission/membership
Explore premium experiences
Plan their visit
Site visitors found little difficulty completing tasks like purchasing Zoo admission.
However, when it came to navigating the site beyond the main call-to-action buttons in the top navigation, users were finding the site frustrating and confusing, leading to a high volume of calls to Customer Service.
Visitors entering the San Diego Zoo. Photo credit: Stephanie Bevil-Pagaduan
Persona 1:
Mia
Mia is a busy professional who needs to find something fun (and preferably educational) for her kids to do over summer break while she’s at work.
She is a mother of two—a Kindergartener who is fascinated with dinosaurs and bugs, and a 3rd Grader who loves to draw and paint. Mia heard from another parent at her children’s elementary school that the San Diego Zoo has kid friendly activities, and she knows her kids would love to spend their summer break at one of their favorite destinations.
Painpoint 1.
Confusing Navigation
Navigation bar hierarchy, categories, and link titles were non-intuitive, led off to other websites, and were at times, redundant.
In Mia’s example, she intuitively clicked on KIDS in the top navigation bar, which confused her by taking her off of the main visitation site.
Solution 1.
New Navigation Bar Hierarchy
Links to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance family of websites were moved to the site footer, ensuring that users would no longer (accidentally) click off of the Zoo visitation site first thing.
Before:
The top green “family of sites” navigation bar situated above the main navigation confused users.
After:
Solution 2.
User Centered Navigation
Main navigation was re-organized into categories that better met Zoo visitors’ needs and expectations.
Before:
Once a user hovered over a navigation title, they would see a mega-menu with confusing, inconsistent titles. Categories aligned with the departments that ran each “Experience,” which made perfect sense internally, but meant nothing to site visitors.
After:
I replaced the mega-menu with recognizable, intuitive category titles. In this example, “Experiences” is replaced with “Things to Do,” the sub-links are removed from the menu, and moved to appropriate category pages.
Results:
After the redesigned navigation and category pages went live, Call Center reported a significant (85%) drop in visitors calling for help with finding and selecting Upgraded Experiences. Visitors are spending more time on the site, using it as their primary tool in making their purchase decisions.
Stephanie Bevil-Pagaduan
