Pet Rodeo sells animal-themed apparel and donates a portion of every sale to nonprofit veterinary care. The founder had run a nonprofit operating low-cost vet clinics, the mission was real. Her site looked clean at first glance, too.
But in the cart, two donation mechanisms sat stacked on top of each other. Try to add a dollar, and the cart filled with a hundred one-cent line items.
Nothing about the site screamed broken. That's exactly why it needed a closer look.
I ran a full heuristic review in Figma, screen by screen. A missing CTA above the fold, a logo that lost legibility on mobile, ten navigation items with no real hierarchy, gaps against WCAG guidelines.
I benchmarked it against Nielsen Norman Group and Baymard research on nonprofit e-commerce specifically, then packaged the whole thing as its own deliverable, something she could act on no matter what happened with the rest of the project.
I sat down with the founder for a recorded interview, going in without assuming I already knew the fix. What came out of it was a real tension: two different audiences were shopping the same site. Some people wanted the shirts, funny, Western, a little weird in a good way. Others wanted to support the mission and barely cared about the design. The site wasn't speaking clearly to either one.
I built a complete concept in Figma rather than a list of fixes. A hero section now states the mission above the fold, with a clear call to action. Navigation dropped from ten scattered items to seven, organized under two real categories instead of one long list.
The donation math got spelled out too — 100% of profit, with the exact mechanic underneath. No more "proceeds." An actual number, stated plainly.
Every piece of research pointed at the same root issue. The mission was good. The product was fine. But nothing on the site built confidence that either one was real.
A shopper who came for the shirt needed confidence in the product, sizing, photography, quality. A shopper who came for the cause needed confidence in the mission, where the money actually goes, and how much of it. The site was built for neither conversation in particular, so it half-answered both.
Fixing the UI wasn't really the job. Fixing what the UI failed to say, to two different people, was.
Research kept circling the same want: people needed to see the shirt on an actual person, and know how it would fit before buying. I mocked up photography on real models for the concept and wrote sizing copy around real reference points — a model's actual height and weight, next to the size they're wearing, instead of a generic chart.
The new logo concept lived here too, tested on a real product page instead of in isolation.
A fully custom Shopify build matching every page was beyond my experience at the time, and well beyond her budget. So the deliverable became a complete, ready-to-reference design instead of a finished product.
She took it from there, hired a graphic designer for a new logo, picked up the photography herself, and brought me back to help implement what I could on a new Shopify theme.
The photography stuck completely, she's since run her own shoots on real models, which was the whole point. The new logo shipped too, though it ended up different from the one in my concept. Navigation got simplified for a while, close to what I'd recommended. Checking back recently, it's already creeping toward where it started.
None of that's a failure. It's what happens when you hand a non-designer the reasoning instead of staying on as the one making every call.
