02VCA Animal Hospitals
Connecting the public with knowledge and resources from one of the largest and most-trusted veterinary networks.
about
VCA is one of the largest veterinary networks, providing comprehensive care including advanced diagnostics, surgery, and 24/7 emergency services throughout the country. They wanted to create a hub on their website that aggregates VCA’s knowledge, resources, and services for the public. In collaboration with Clever Creative and VCA’s internal team, I completed the UX design for the hub, from initial site mapping and user flows, to final developer handoff.
01
userflows
02
wireframes
03
design system
01
userflows
02
wireframes
03
design system
01
userflows
02
wireframes
03
design system
01
userflows
02
wireframes
03
design system
The VCA Animal Hospitals Resource Hub is a centralized destination for veterinarian-backed pet health content, covering everything from common conditions and treatments to behavior, lifestyle, and preventive care. Designed for dog and cat owners navigating everything from routine wellness to complex health concerns, the hub organizes a large and growing content library into an intuitive, searchable experience. It launched in early 2026 following a two-year design and development process.
01userflows
The foundation of the resource hub was designing an information architecture that worked equally well for pet owners browsing for answers and for SEO — two goals that required careful, collaborative planning.
information architecture
Working with VCA's internal SEO team, I mapped content across four primary topic categories with species (Dogs, Cats) as a second navigational axis. A central challenge was determining when to prompt users to identify their pet's species — the user flows resolved this by allowing both topic-first and species-first entry paths, with species selection surfacing contextually at the category level to prevent dead ends while keeping species-specific URLs individually indexable.
02wireframes
The wireframing phase translated the sitemap and user flows into concrete page structures, with modularity as the guiding principle. Because we were working within VCA's existing design system, the component library we had to pull from was limited — so a significant part of this phase was identifying which existing site modules could be adapted for the hub, and defining new ones where gaps existed.
Each new component was designed to be flexible enough to serve multiple contexts: an article card, a category navigation block, or promotional module could be arranged and rearranged across different page templates as needed. This modular approach was practical given the phased launch strategy, as it allowed new page types and content sections to be built out over time by recombining existing pieces rather than designing from scratch.
navigation
A key output of the wireframing phase was defining the hub's persistent navigation bar — a lightweight but hardworking component that needed to communicate the full category and species structure at a glance while remaining unobtrusive on content pages. The nav had to flex across the topic-first and species-first entry paths established in the user flows, making it one of the most considered and iterated components in the entire design.
Each new component was designed to be flexible enough to serve multiple contexts: an article card, a category navigation block, or promotional module could be arranged and rearranged across different page templates as needed. This modular approach was practical given the phased launch strategy, as it allowed new page types and content sections to be built out over time by recombining existing pieces rather than designing from scratch.
03design system
Because VCA's existing design system was outdated and largely unworkable for a project of this scope, I built a new one from the ground up — scoped specifically to the resource hub but designed to grow. The system catalogs every module and component developed across the project, reflecting the same modularity and flexibility central to the wireframing phase. Each component is documented for plug-and-play use, so that as the hub expands in future phases, the development team can reference and implement pieces consistently without needing to reinvent or reinterpret the design.