Rehome

1. Overview

Rehome is a sub-brand of Adopt a Pet, designed to help pet owners find loving new homes for their pets when they can no longer care for them.
My goal was to make the rehoming process simple, supportive, and trustworthy for users during an emotionally difficult time—while strengthening one of Adopt a Pet’s key revenue channels.

  • Location: San Francisco, CA

  • Role: UX/UI Designer

  • Scope: Brand identity, UI design, & User Testing

2. Problem

Each year, about one-third of shelter animals—over 2.5 million—are surrendered by their owners. Many could have stayed in their homes with the right support. Those who try to rehome their pets often face unclear options, unreliable sources like Craigslist, and overwhelming emotions.

Rehome needed to provide a trustworthy, stress-free experience for owners while ensuring pets find safe, lasting homes.

Solutions

2. Objectives

Business Goal

Save lives by helping owners either keep their pets or find safe new homes.

Design Goal

  • Build a distinct yet cohesive sub-brand under Adopt a Pet

  • Improve navigation and clarity of CTAs

  • Create a calm, trustworthy, and supportive experience

Marketing Goal

  • Position Rehome as the go-to rehoming service

  • Increase adoption success rates and brand credibility

4. Discovery

Discovery Notes

  • The existing “Adopt a Pet” header and footer on the Rehome website might be confusing to pet owner users who are looking to rehome their pets.

  • “Adopt a Pet” and “Rehome” brands coexist in the same space yet have incohesive UI elements

  • The “Getting Started” CTA button is crucial yet hardly visible or available across the site

  • UI lacked visual consistency and hierarchy

Information Architecture

Current IA

  • The header and footer for “Adopt a Pet” (mothership brand) coexist on the “Rehome” site

  • No link to Get Started (onboarding page) on the How It Works page, Help Me Keep My Pet page, and Pet FAQs page

Proposal IA

  • Add the “Rehome” logo on the header

  • Clean up the footer with “Rehome” contents

  • Remove sponsor logos from the header

  • Created a dedicated ‘Resources’ section to organize educational content and improve SEO visibility
    Rename

    • “Create a Pet Profile” to “Rehome Your Pet”

    • “Help me keep my pet” to “Keep My Pet”

  • Add “Get Started” (onboarding page) links on the How It Works page, Keep My Pet, and Pet FAQs, SEO

5. Design Process

Brand Exploration

After identifying usability issues, I facilitated a brand workshop to align the team on tone and emotion. We defined six brand attributes — Trust, Delightful, Love, Simple, Comfort, and Fresh — to guide design decisions.


Based on the brand attributes, I presented three sets of design concepts with design strategies for the stakeholders. After the presentation, the team decided to go with the following design direction.

Concept: Journey to a Forever Home.

“We are your partner in finding a loving home for your pet.”

  • Emphasis on the well-being of your pet with its new family

  • Create a sense of comfort and support as we commit to be the guiding light in the entire process

  • Evoking a sense of/confidence in the fact that your pet can be supported, have its needs met, and feel comfortable, safe, and loved in a new home. He/she will be himself/herself

Moodboard

6. Design Solutions

To improve clarity and engagement, I proposed:

  • A new Rehome-specific header and footer

  • Unified brand identity consistent with Adopt a Pet but visually distinct

  • Consistent blue CTAs placed prominently across key pages

  • Modernized UI with pet imagery, whitespace, and calming colors

Wireframes

7. Final Deliverables

Mobile Mockups

Desktop Mockups

8. Testing & Optimization

To validate design decisions, I conducted A/B and multivariate tests using Optimizely and AB Tasty between February and June 2018.

One key experiment tested different CTA button colors to improve user engagement.
Variation #1 (a blue CTA, consistent with the site’s color system) significantly outperformed the original design — increasing engagement by 2.1% and boosting the conversion rate by 235%.

These results confirmed that consistent visual hierarchy and color usage can have a major impact on user behavior and overall adoption success.

Test Example

Changing bubble and CTA colors

Variations

Original (Control)

Variation #1 Winner

Hypothesis
I predict placing the current blue CTA button style for this UI will lead to an increase in clicks as we are consistently using blue CTA color.

Summary
The A/B test ran from Feb 6, 2018, until Feb 9, 2018, with a total of 4865 users participating.

Results
The engagement of variation #1 was increased by 2.10% and the conversion rate was increased by 235.20%.

Previous

Adopt a Pet