Designing a concept application for Pet Adoption Services.
Our clickable prototype can be visited here
Domestic pet shelters are over crowded and constantly experiencing returns within in 6month of the animal being adopted. Due to a lack of solid education that the industry provides, many new families and young couples are dealing with financial pressures after taking in an animal they were not properly prepared for.
Many pets will spend their lives never leaving the shelters after being rescued as there is a common misconception that an animal placed in shelter has something wrong with itself. In fact the only thing wrong with them is they don’t have a human to love them properly.
The opportunities to find the right pet for you are narrow and slightly unguided. Many websites have personalisation traits where you can read paragraphs of results on your ‘perfect match’ however seeking that match afterwards are troublesome and complicated for many users. Mobile applications are having a similar issue and still the distribution of education is lacking greatly.
As part of our project, our team was asked to create a mobile app that would alleviate the pressures of miscommunication and design an easy to use and personal experience for people seeking adoption.
Introductions
All three of us took part in every stage of the process, however we realise that each of us are stronger in certain areas which is where we each took a leading role in. We took the opportunity to get into character for our profile pictures as have a little fun with our presentation.
Research
As a result a huge 31% of dogs and 36% of cats are euthanized in North America as over population is becoming a problem.
During our research we found the least pet returns were made from 30 something men or women, in relationships with a substantial career behind them. Many of which were home owners, or soon to be.
As our app is a platform for rescue centres and shelters to enrol their data base onto, we realised our secondary user was clearly the volunteers and shelter owners conversing with their customers via PawSeekr. We interviewed a range of potential users,
- Current pet owners from rescue centres,
- Single working professionals in Vancouver,
- New families or home owners and
- Volunteers at Rescue Centres and Shelter Homes.
Concerning contact with the Shelter owners and Foster homes, we found they weren’t as accessible for us in the time frame we had, however we still spoke with rescue volunteers and gained a lot of insight from the people in the know.
Reviewing the Industry Statistics
- Approximately 7.6 million animals enter shelters nationwide every year.
- Of those entering shelters, 31% of dogs are euthenized.
- Domestic pets are returned to shelters due to lack of education.
We found one of the main problems was that there are so many sources for information that slightly contradict each other, so the user never knows what is true. We took a look at our competitors to see where they came in with distributing education to potential pet owners and how important this was felt across the board.
The competitive analysis of the mobile apps helped us to figure out the gaps that PawSeekr could potentially fill.
- The existing apps we looked at were mainly search tools.
- The user had to go elsewhere to learn about pet ownership and care.
- Many had a filtering function to generate a suggested breed, but none of them provided a personal matching system.
- The user still had to sift through the results and determine for themselves which animal was right for them.
- The descriptions of the animals were uninspiring and non-specific.
- The experience is impersonal and limited to the users needs.
From gathering this data and further discussing our business goals, to ensure we kept inline with the objectives of the project. We found a fantastic opportunity for us to
- Create a system that matches human characteristics to those of pets, and perhaps match them to ones that might otherwise have been dismissed.
- Provide relevant education on the breed, temperament, and medical needs of the dog selected via the user. Because this is an enrolment platform for shelters, we would acquire the personal information of the dogs to write their story and background tied in with their breed to give a well rounded idea of what this dog really needs.
- Create an emotional connection and tell a story from the point of view of the animals
- There is the opportunity to create greater shelter-adoptee interaction throughout the process
User Research
Once Leslie, Tiffany and I had been assigned together, we took 30–45 minutes aside to write down each of our strengths, weaknesses and desires. From this we were able to see where each of us could either learn, or take lead. We quickly put this into motion and developed a sense of solidarity and union.
We all agreed that in our individual previous experiences, our personas were much more relevant when we had a basic grasp of our research, so we opted to do a day of investigation into the industry before heading to our user interviews.
When we began the research phase, we each took different sized sections depending on how competent we were in our tactics (Least competent took the largest load, in order to improve on skills).
We had done a lot of groundwork and it was, for the majority, the right areas of research to do. However, I think we could have had a much stronger case to start with if we worked in a team, as transitioning from our Affinity Diagram to our Personas we noticed a few holes which could have been missed if we designed our user interview questions together. A tactic I will remember for the next project.
Creating our Journey Map
To further understand where out app would fit into the industry we created a journey map. We did this from gathering the survey and user interview data as well as looking through our research to find how the system works. From these lumps of information we drew out how the typical ‘pet seeker’ would feel going through this process.
Scenario
Building our scenario was easiest for us once we created a few user stories and then followed on from these points. We wanted to create a story based on our Primary Persona and how she might have ideally dealt with her situation.
Primary User Stories
- As I’m looking to rescue a dog, I want to do one application for all the different shelters to save time.
- As my new place is dog friendly, I am looking to adopt a dog for companionship.
Secondary User Stories
- As a rescue centre volunteer, I am passionate about connecting the right pet to the right owner.
- As a rescue centre volunteer, I understand the necessity of appropriate placement for our animals and a standardised platform for all the research purposes.
Each of us learnt new skills and techniques, and we were happy with the outcome of both scenario and storyboard.
This was a good example of our strengths and weaknesses coming out and how we could utilise them to their potential. Tiffany took control over our the grammar, Leslie was our designer and I lead the storytelling role.
The Features
Following from our journey map we saw the pain points in which the currently industry applications held already and saw the opportunity to fill those gaps in. However we quickly realised how much data we had collected over the past week and felt slightly overwhelmed. We created a graph in which we could easily prioritise our feature list ideas and place the ‘Must Have’ against out ‘Nice to Haves’ in a well formed manor for us to smoothly continue.
Building a User Flow
The goal for creating a user flow was so we could map out our designs and presentation layout on how the ideal user would go from entering into the app to booking a meet and greet with their pet of choice.
As a team we work well together because we naturally acknowledged each other and yet judged the ideas, not the people it came from which made our stages pretty smooth along the way. Once our user flow started, we all sunk into a tired spell and collectively weren’t producing anything substantial, instead we were going round in tight circles.
This was an important time in our group as we decided to each take our ideas of the user flow as homework, come back the following day and discuss. From that we would take the best qualities from each others work and form a ‘master flow’.
Because of this decision and how positive our outcome was, we continued to use this method of collaboration throughout the project.
The Design
Following on from our Use Case and user Flow, we took the ‘Design Studio’ method for each paper wireframe to individually create our vision of the application. We would come together and discuss which sections of each we liked and how to incorporate them into our designs.
We did a lot of collaborative wireframes on the profile design, we knew that Pawseekr succeeds when our users can find their ideal pet simply and effectively.
- To follow this, we did some user testing via paper prototyping. We discovered:
- The users didn’t fully understand our splash page
- Our testers didn’t understand what the messaging button was until they were prompted near the end of the flow by an In App message.
- We needed more confirmation screens to let the user know they did a good job and they are continuing onto the next stage with their details currently being saved.
We went back to the drawing board to further amend these details and continued on to create Moodboards and a Tone of Voice,
Our Moodboard
We selected our colours from a few pictures we found from building our individual mock moodboards via Pinterest before coming together to discuss. We chose three colours to use throughout our prototype which came to be Coral, Teal and Yellow. We took these on because they were energetic and exciting, much like the descriptions made by our interviewees when talking about their own adoption process.
We understood the nature of why many of the animals were in the shelters and took a step back from a too vibrant colour palette as we didn’t want to detract from the fact many were up for adoption because they have or currently still are suffering.
Branding
Our tone of voice is unique. We believe that to build empathy our users need to feel an emotional connection to each animal they come across. There are so many stories to tell, and whenever ever possible, who better to tell it than themselves. We’re open, honest, and personable. Let’s start a conversation and show these animals what it’s like to have a loving home.
FRIENDLY: We’re approachable. We’re caring. We’re non-institutional. Frankly, we don’t see ourselves as a company, but more like your friend introducing you to another friend at a party. So, being sincere, human, and sensitive comes natural to us.
DEDICATED: We’re not your online dating app. You know the one that pairs up with Joe Schmoe, who’s totally not your type? We’ve got dog ownership down to a science, and we are committed to finding the best fit.
ENCOURAGING: We know bringing another life into your life is a big deal. We will support and educate, but we’re not overbearing. You will never hear us tell you you can’t do it.
Our Prototype
Our clickable prototype can be visited here on Invision.
The Design Hurdles
Our biggest hurdles were Creating an engaging Splash Page with use of visuals, Profile Page and a friendly Form Design that our users would be happy fill in.
Splash Page:
We had originally created an interactive page where you would play ‘Fetch’ with a dog to enter the App. After testing this on a user, we saw, they were confused and our screen wasn’t as intuitive as we had thought. We then moved onto a large paw that would shrink its way down to the nav bar to then open the app. We all enjoyed this animation but it was difficult to convey for our presentation so during the high fidelity we opted for an interesting photographic background which we later discussed was a much more relatable approach.
Testing the splash page with a few users was a really great help because,
- It wasn’t as intuitive as we thought, so we decided to drop the interaction for fear of further confusions.
- Our message notification system wasn’t quite legible enough, so we doctored it when we got to the high fidelity stage.
Profile Pages:
The structure of our Doggy Profile Pages was a crucial point to introduce a push on the education needed to decrease the high pet return rate we found in our research. We were struggling with drop down boxes vs open bullet points or swiping motions vs tap etc. Our questions were, What do they want to know vs what do they need to know and how do we display that?
Following our research, we knew our users found knowing the Personality and Breed of a dog were the two most important factors before deciding to adopt. With this in mind, we played around with the size and positioning of those two pieces by doing 2 days of Design Studio for these components.
Form Design:
Considering the users and how they prefer to ingest information which was via imagery over blocks of text.
We tried a number of methods like,
- Clickable drop down boxes
- Sectioned into Basic Info, What can you provide for your pet and Career or marital statuses
- Up top we have always said we would place a pup getting closer and closer to a person, but at the last minute we replaced the person for a graphic of a dog house. Our ambitions were slightly too detailed and we realised with the space we had, the graphics had to be very simple.
- How many questions across was a question we came to a few times. We started by putting two drop downs side by side, which made the form look a lot more cluttered than it actually is.
For our presentation we each took a section to speak on, which would be a place we either took a leading role in or where we may have known the research very well.
Our preperation of the the presentation took a little longer than I think any of us wanted as we three were working until 3am the night before. However our work dynamic was great, we have a sort of ‘Factory’ system going. For example, I would take care of the basic information placed on the slides, Tiffany would organise them and make sure they made sense, while seeing if anything was missed. Leslie would redesign the typography and placements of the graphics while Tiffany and I would source more relevant photos as well as check for any gaps.
We conducted user testing on our first set of paper prototypes and discovered that our users didn’t like an onboarding or tutorial feature. They also didn’t feel a need to be able to prioritize search parameters as there were only three categories and the gesture to perform this action was unfamiliar. User testing also helped us uncover an additional screen state that we did not consider. This screen was a booking confirmation page that also provided the user with the shelter’s address and contact information.
Conclusion
I learnt a lot from this project,
- from the value of being vulnerable when it’s appropriate,
- learning from each other’s strengths and realising we each have our own that are just as valuable.
- The importance of team work and true solidarity
- Collaboration is the best way to go.
Our Mantra, “Fail more to Succeed Quicker”
A Recap
Our goal was to create an educational and personal application for North Americans to adopt their ideal pets. We achieved our goals by including:
- Breed specific information
- Percentage based matching
- Personalized animal stories
- The human experience
- One central place for information
- One application process
Future Considerations
As we only had 2 weeks to complete our application, we had noted down some attributes we would be considering if this application was to be revisited.
- Peer Submitted Pet profiles — this means that users have the ability to upload pet profiles through the app
- Featured Pets — shelters have ability to promote pets that are older, or have been in the shelter for an extended period of time. This would appear in a “featured pets” section that the user can quickly click in to.
- Interactive education — interactive tutorials or videos
