San Diego Zoo

A Visitor-centric Site Redesign for the World Famous Zoo.

Challenge:

I was tasked with transforming a decade-old, convoluted site structure into a mobile-friendly, user-friendly, experience for an amazing destination.

Throughout its 100+ year history, the San Diego Zoo has been a wildlife lover’s dream, housing more than 3,500 amazing animals and offering once-in-a-lifetime behind-the-scenes educational experiences. Its parent organization, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (formerly San Diego Zoo Global), is one of the largest zoological membership associations in the world, with more than 250,000 member households and 130,000 child memberships, representing more than a half million people. With more than 4 million visitors yearly, San Diego Zoo is the most visited zoo in the United States.

As expected, these visitors and members are looking to their mobile devices for all of their visitation needs: from buying admission tickets, to deciding where to grab a quick bite. While the Zoo’s site had gone through a few redesigns over the years, it was time to take a deep dive into it’s decade-old structure, meet with key internal stakeholders, and interview actual guests to find out what they expected and needed the website to do for them.