Pet Adoption
The brief
Millions of animals are currently in shelters and foster homes awaiting adoption. Design an experience that will help connect people looking for a new pet with the right companion for them. Help an adopter find a pet which matches their lifestyle, considering factors including breed, gender, age, temperament, and health status. Provide a high-fidelity mock for at least one step of this experience.
Understanding the issue
In the UK, in 2016 there was a total of 81,050 stray dogs. From those, 37,728 remain unclaimed in a shelter (source). There’s also an estimated 150,000 stray cats in shelters every year – just in the UK.
Those that remain in shelters can sometimes spend as much as 400 days at the shelter and many are put to sleep when capacity is reached. Large black dogs (black dog syndrome) and senior dogs are often the less likely to be adopted.
On top of that, a lot of people are still not comfortable with the idea of adopting a pet from a shelter. And when they do, they still find various obstacles, for example: individuals or couples on a full time job or with children are less likely to be able to adopt a pet from a shelter (source).
Every year, volunteers spend vast amounts of valuable time analysing and rejecting applications from people that are unfit for the shelters’ strict criteria for adoption. This, in return, increases the number of people that resort to buying a pet from stores or online.
What success looks like
Considering all the research done, I’ve come up with a list of goals that this project should be able to achieve:
1. Increase the number of successful adoptions;
2. Reduce the number of unfit applicants;
3. Maximising the reach of animal shelters with minimum effort;
4. Target individuals that wouldn’t normally consider adopting a pet;
5. Take advantage of existing Google Search functionality.
Barriers
Unfortunately, there is very little research done on pet adoption but specially on the different types of people that adopt pets and their motives. When did they decided they wanted to adopt? How was the process? How long did it take? And why did they want to adopt a pet in the first place? This would help to understand the triggers for adopting a pet vs buying.
Considering all the above, I’ve established a long term goal:
Connect people looking for a pet with the right animal for their lifestyle, no matter where the pet is sheltered.
The solution
Based on the goal established, I started by drafting a quick flow of the pet discovery journey. My main goal with this solution is to target users that are not necessarily looking into adopting a pet, but also users that are searching on Google for certain keywords (e.g. puppies, kittens) or topics like dog or cat breeds (e.g. poodles, Persian cats, etc).
With this in mind, if a user types in a search query with the aforementioned keywords/topics the search results page will return (alongside the conventional results) rich card recommendations of pets, related to the search terms, that are available for adoption from a range of animal shelters in the nearby area.
It is important to reference that scheduling the appointment for the adoption should be face to face to allow user and pet to meet. That is why I haven’t included it as part of the flow. The main achievement for this solution is to get the user to go to the shelter and meet the pet in person.
The creative solution
On the high-fidelity mockups the main goal for the user interface was to, as much as possible, keep the visual language consistent with the Material Design guidelines and to let the new modules blend in seamlessly with the Google Search.
On the “Turn On updates” flow and in the Pet Profile I’ve made use of bold colours and graphics as this is the only part of the exercise that is not part of the Google search. Therefore, creating more empathy with the user in this area which is something that is not really possible in the main Google Search pages.
Future opportunities
Considering the scope of the exercise, there wasn’t enough time to look at all the opportunities that could be valuable for this project. One of the aspects that was overlooked because of the focus on the individual pets was the shelters. To give the prospective adopter some reassurance, the ability to learn more about the shelter where the pet is housed can potentially add significant weight to the decision of wether or not adopting. (e.g. ability to rate a shelters’ cleanliness, medical care, volunteers, etc).
Something else that could bring considerable value is AI & Machine Learning. It could help to better understand someone’s lifestyle and traveling habits based on a users’ geolocation, emails, calendars, etc in order to better select a more suitable pet for one’s lifestyle. All while requiring minimum input from the user and safeguarding accurate outputs for the animal shelters.
A smart assistant could also be useful to provide tailored content regarding procedures, costs and regulation for travelling with an animal based on its size, country of origin, destination and so on. This could be crucial to help users make a well informed decision when the moment comes to adopt a pet.
Conclusion
This solution is focused around the goal of finding a pet that is suitable for a user’s lifestyle by presenting them with the opportunity to search for animals across multiple shelters at the same time.
As in any project, the solution could have taken several different paths. With this exercise I wanted to refrain from building a dedicated app and, to some extent, limit the solution to Google Search functionality like Knowledge Graph. But by using Search the solution can further extend its capabilities (e.g. use of contextual content and smart alerts) when used through the Google app.
There are obviously areas where this solution may fall short. Additional research and testing would be needed in order to understand how to better educate people and tackle the stigma that still surrounds the adoption of pets from an animal shelter.
Nevertheless, the goal of this solution is bifold: to help struggling animal shelters by reaching to new and more people; and consequently connecting those people to the right companion—giving them a new and loving home.
