Dogs Trust
I helped introduce task-based usability testing with real dog owners and supporters, observing real tasks and using the friction we found to shape improvements. Following the design changes, website sessions increased 37% year on year, users increased 40%, rehoming page views increased 32%, and gift sales from referred traffic increased 12%. Don’t debate what customers want in a meeting room when you can watch what they actually do.
Context
Dogs Trust had a large, high-traffic digital estate serving very different user needs — from people looking to rehome a dog to supporters donating or buying gifts. Following a website redesign, performance data suggested that some important journeys were not working as well as they could. Small pieces of friction were having a measurable effect on how people moved through the site and converted. The opportunity was not another redesign. It was to understand where the experience was breaking down and improve it systematically.
My Role
Co-Founder Baked Agency and Project Lead on this project. I worked across digital optimisation and supporter experience, using behavioural data and customer journeys to identify friction, prioritise opportunities and improve performance. My role sat between user experience, analytics, fundraising and ecommerce: turning evidence about what people were doing into practical changes the organisation could make.
Problem
Two website redesigns across two different agencies to a legacy 10-year old website led to decline in performance and my job was to figure out why. The redesign had introduced friction into several high-value journeys. The challenge was to understand: - Where were users dropping out? - Which journeys mattered most? - Were apparently small UX decisions suppressing conversion? - How could we improve performance without rebuilding the site again? - Which changes would create measurable value for supporters and Dogs Trust? The key was to move away from opinions about the website and look at actual behaviour.
Approach
I analysed key supporter and customer journeys, using site performance and behavioural data to identify where people were encountering unnecessary friction. I brought dog owners and their dogs into our studio to observe their use of the existing Dogs Trust website and throughout the redesign to map the customer journey and to get feedback on the feel of the website. This meant I spot problems and optimise performance and brand/customer sentiment during the redesign. My approach was influenced by Steve Krug's book Don’t Make Me Think (buy it or borrow my well worn copy). Rather than treating the website as one big optimisation problem, I broke it into specific journeys and looked for high-impact improvements across areas such as: - supporter journeys - ecommerce and gifts - navigation - conversion paths - rehoming content - traffic and engagement The focus was on making targeted changes, measuring what happened and using the evidence to decide where to optimise next.
Experiments / Evidence
+37% sessions · +40% users · +32% rehoming page views · +12% gift sales
Outcome
The optimisation work helped turn a redesign problem into a programme of continuous improvement. Rather than relying on another large redesign, Dogs Trust could use evidence from real customer behaviour to find and remove friction incrementally. The work contributed to: +37% traffic +12% online gift sales and stronger digital supporter journeys across the organisation
What I Learned
01 — Small friction can have a big commercial impact You don’t always need a new proposition. Removing one unnecessary step can sometimes unlock value that is already there. 02 — Optimisation starts with behaviour, not opinion Analytics and journey evidence helped focus attention on where users were actually struggling rather than where stakeholders assumed the problem was. 03 — Break the website into decisions “Improve the website” is too broad. Looking at individual journeys, behaviours and conversion points creates much more actionable problems. 04 — Continuous improvement beats repeated redesign Large redesigns create risk. A disciplined optimisation loop lets teams learn and improve without repeatedly rebuilding the whole experience. One particularly useful example came from the gifts journey. A relatively small experience issue was making it harder for users to move naturally between content and the gift shop. Fixing that journey helped contribute to a 12% increase in online gift sales. More broadly, digital performance improved substantially, with traffic increasing 37% during the period.
