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OPEN SANCTUARY
How Open Sanctuary
Project Increased
it’s Website User
Engagement by 300%
Website redesign of a non-profit organization that led
to a 300% increase in user engagement
Challenge
Low User Engagement rate & Existing website ineffective to meet user needs
Services
UX research, Web Strategy, Re-design, and Implementation
Outcome
Increased it’s Website User Engagement by 300%

Overview
The Open Sanctuary Project is a freely accessible, rapidly-growing digital guide for anyone looking to create and manage an animal sanctuary. The client was looking for a website redesign and Interaction Labs delivered way more than just a website redesign.
Our Approach
We analyzed the underlying bottlenecks and opportunities to optimize the user experience. We also looked at ways to improve content consumption and build a website truly geared towards conversions.
Type of Project
○ Content publishing / Resources
○ Non-Profit Organization
○ Website UX
Services
○ Data Analytics
○ UX Strategy
○ UX Redesign
○ Website Redevelopment
○ Server Migration
Tools & Platforms
○ Figma
○ WordPress
○ Elementor
○ Google Analytics
Discovery and Ideation Workshop
After multiple conversations with the founders, a detailed UX Audit of the website and deep data analytics, we discovered some apparent and major challenges:
- The website had a bounce rate of 75% which means the users navigate away from the website without taking any action.
- 1.27 page views per session indicated that despite high quality articles, the user interaction with the content was extremely low
- Only 0.05% of the users scrolled to the bottom and subscribed to the Newsletter which was another indicator of low engagement
- Users scroll until 25% of the page depth on most pages of the website because the content is not visible in the top fold and relevant CTAs are only visible once a user scrolls at least until 25% of the overall page depth
Site Architecture: Moving from complexity to simplicity
To revamp the site, the Interaction Labs team decided to revamp the site architecture.
The heart of the Open Sanctuary Project is its content so the focus was on organizing and structuring the content to encourage positive user engagement.
.
We simplified the content and classified it into three key categories:
Farm Animal Care Guide
Framework to Run a Sanctuary
About the Open Sanctuary Project
We placed content strategically at the top of each page to ensure that 100% of the users are exposed to the content on the website.
The content classification brought alignment at a macro level and set the tone to restructure the information architecture on the website. The redesigned information architecture laid the groundwork for an effective user experience.
“The content classification highlighted and recalibrated the organization website towards its core purpose which had earlier gotten lost in the labyrinth of content…”
Mckenzee Griffler
Founder, The Open Sanctuary Project
Crafting a seamless user
experience through intuitive design
- Created Mega menus to help users reach any key section with just one click
- Article recommendations at the end of the page and on the right side of the article detail page
- An engaging About us page to communicate the purpose and connect with the audience.
- We created a unique Donation page that communicated the purpose and encourage the visitor to donate
- We added subscription hooks at strategic locations like floating CTAs at the top of the page to capture first-party data in the form of email addresses. to drive Newsletter Subscriptions. Header with prominent CTA’s to subscribe to the Newsletter and Donate.
- We designed specific landing pages for different animal species to discover relevant articles on each species and a highly engaging Animal Care Page.

Mobile First Approach to Design
Since most of the traffic to the website is from mobile devices, we designed it with a mobile-first approach

Aesthetic UI, and visual design that appeals to the female audience since they represent the dominant group of all the users.
Powering the digital presence
Using Elementor, we translated the pixel-perfect Figma files into a highly
responsive, mobile-friendly website.
We identified the key widgets and removed redundant plugins without
compromising the adaptability and speed of the website.
responsive, mobile-friendly website.
We identified the key widgets and removed redundant plugins without
compromising the adaptability and speed of the website.
Groundbreaking Outcomes
As a result of revamping the website, Open Sanctuary website got a new
lease of life and 300% higher user engagement.
lease of life and 300% higher user engagement.
The Results
300%
Rise in average session duration

41%
Decrease in the bounce rate

189%
Increase in average pages per session

18.26%
Increase in the number of sessions per user

These insights are generated using Google Analytics, GTMetrix, and Google
PageSpeed.
PageSpeed.