A site that looked like it didn't need your donation.
Big Cat Rescue runs on the generosity of people who will never set foot on the property. Its old website made that harder than it needed to be, donation options buried under a layout worn enough to make the organization look shut down. We chose this project ourselves, and spent the weeks after learning that agreement is harder to reach than any one good idea.
Scroll to begin ↓"A donor doesn't see the sanctuary. They see the website, and decide from that alone whether the place is real."
The Problem
This project started with a choice, not a brief. As a four-person team in a UI/UX bootcamp, we had to pick our own organization to redesign, which meant the first real design decision happened before we'd opened Figma: who do we build this for, and why does it matter enough to spend weeks on?
We landed on Big Cat Rescue, a sanctuary for tigers, lions, and other big cats, after looking at their existing site and finding it worked against the very thing it needed to do. The donation flow was buried, the page structure didn't reflect how a visitor thinks about a non-profit (which animals do you help, how do you give, why should you trust this), and the visual design looked dated enough to undercut its own credibility. For an organization that depends entirely on donor trust, an unconvincing website isn't a cosmetic problem. It's the whole funnel.
Research & Discovery
We ran user interviews and a short survey with people who'd donated to causes like this before, to understand what moves someone from "I care about this" to "I gave money." The sample was small, this was a bootcamp project on a bootcamp timeline, but the pattern across answers was consistent enough to act on.
The most useful finding wasn't any single number, it was the combination of "100% say transparency is very important" next to a donation flow that, on the existing site, gave almost no information about where money went. That gap, between what people say they need to trust an organization and what the current site offered, became the thesis for the whole redesign: a site that's honest about itself reads as more trustworthy than one that just looks polished.
This was a real survey, but a small, informal one run by a student team, not a validated research study. We treated it as a strong directional signal, not a statistically rigorous dataset, and weighed our own judgment alongside it rather than letting four data points override every design conversation.
What We Were Working Against
Before redesigning anything, we audited the existing Big Cat Rescue site as a team and wrote down every friction point we could agree on without much debate. This list ended up being the one part of the project where all four of us were aligned from the start:
- Too many pages, with no clear hierarchy between them
- Limited options for donating, both in payment method and frequency
- Confusing site architecture that didn't match how a visitor thinks
- Inconsistent typography across pages
- A visual style that looked expired, which made it harder to trust
- Information overload on pages that needed to make a fast case for donating
Define & Ideate
With four designers and no client to break ties, almost every meaningful decision in this project went through some version of the same loop: someone proposes a direction, someone else pushes back with a real reason, and the team has to resolve it rather than letting whoever's loudest win. Two of those moments shaped the final design more than any single screen did.
Lean into the "exotic animal sanctuary" angle hard, big imagery, dramatic color, an interface that feels like an adventure. That's what makes people stop scrolling.
If it feels too much like entertainment, it undercuts the credibility a donor needs to feel before giving money to a non-profit they've never heard of.
Keep the vibrant, photographic, slightly wild visual identity that makes the animals feel real and present, but pair it with a calmer, more conventional layout structure underneath, so the page still reads as organized and trustworthy, not flashy.
Surface every animal type, every program, every way to help, right on the homepage. More options means more ways for a visitor to find something that resonates.
That's the exact information-overload problem we just flagged on the old site. A first-time visitor doesn't need every option, they need one clear next step.
A simplified site map: Home, Get Involved, Cub Facts, and Donate as the four top-level destinations, with the deeper content (animal types, volunteer paths, cat laws) nested one level in in instead of all competing for space up front.
Neither of those resolutions was any one person's idea by the end. That's the part of group design that's harder to put on a slide than a clean wireframe: the real skill wasn't generating ideas, it was running enough rounds of "what are we both actually optimizing for" until the disagreement turned into a sharper version of the design instead of a stalemate.
Design Decisions
From lo-fi to hi-fi
We started in low-fidelity wireframes to lock the page structure, image carousel up top, search, a mission statement, before anyone touched color or type. That sequencing mattered for a four-person team specifically: it's much easier to agree on where a search bar goes than to agree on it once it's already styled and someone's attached to their version.
A donation flow built around how people give
The research was direct on this point: a strong majority preferred card payment, and donation frequency split heavily toward one-time gifts over monthly ones. We designed the donate page around that reality instead of around what we assumed a non-profit "should" offer, one-time and monthly as equally prominent toggles, preset amount buttons sized for the most common gift ranges, and a confirmation screen that closes the loop instead of leaving a donor wondering if it worked.
A real brand system, not just a homepage
Because we were redesigning an existing organization rather than inventing a fictional one, we built out a full style system. Color and type weren't a moodboard, they were a working spec: a warm olive-and-mango palette suited to a sanctuary rather than a sterile non-profit look, Rubik Mono One for headlines to give the brand a bit of stubborn, hand-stamped personality, and Work Sans for everything else so the donation content stayed easy to read. That system is what let four people design different pages, Get Involved, Cub Facts, Donate, and have them feel like one site instead of four.
Putting It in Front of People
We ran usability tests on the hi-fi prototype before calling it finished, and the findings were specific enough to act on directly rather than vague "users were confused" notes:
- Certain interactive elements didn't stand out enough to register as clickable
- Visitors wanted a clearer overview of what each page contained
- The logo didn't navigate back to the homepage, a default people expected without thinking about it
- The donate form needed a cancel option
- Vertical padding on the donate page felt excessive and made the flow feel longer than it was
- Testers wanted transparency stats surfaced directly on the donate page itself, not just elsewhere on the site
That last finding closed the loop on the research from the start of the project: the same group that told us transparency mattered most also told us, independently, that they wanted to see it at the exact moment they were about to give money. We treated that as a confirmation we'd built the right priority into the page, even with the smaller fixes still left to make.
Results & Reflection
This redesign never shipped, and there's no donation or traffic data to point to. It exists as a complete Figma prototype: full site map, lo-fi through hi-fi screens, a working style system, and usability testing that fed real changes back into the design. What I can speak to honestly is the process, not a deployed result.
By the time we wrapped the project, Big Cat Rescue had unfortunately shut down due to financial struggles. The redesign was never going to be handed off at that point, which is its own quiet reminder that even a well-reasoned design only matters if the organization behind it survives long enough to use it.
What I'd do differently: push earlier for a larger, more structured research sample instead of leaning on a small informal survey, and build in a checkpoint specifically for resolving four-way design disagreements before they happened mid-sprint, rather than working them out in the moment every time. The compromises we landed on were good ones, but we got there more by persistence than by a process built to make that easier.