Design Exercise: Pet Adoption
Just a couple of weeks after working on a similar UX Challenge, I also reached the third stage of the hiring process for a position as Interaction Designer at another company. I had 5 days to complete the following exercise:
“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-level flow and supporting wire frames.”
In this story, I will provide insights into my thought process, the methods and tools I used, as well as the work products I created during each phase. If you like the project, visit my CV chatbot and let me know if you are hiring ;)
Research
The first thing I did upon deciding to work on the pet adoption exercise, was to look for the closest animal shelter. I immediately drove there and convinced the owner to let me intern for the rest of the day in order to gain a deeper understanding of the operation and daily life in shelters.
Afterwards, I tried to find pet owners via my personal network and simply approached pet owners on the street to ask them about their personal opinion on shelters. I also read news articles, message boards and blogs to find out about typical challenges for each phase of the pet adoption process and to verify that these are the same for different countries.
One main insight from my previous research was that the adoption process for dogs contains the most challenges. In order to ensure that my ideas would be valid for all types of pets, I thus chose to initially focus only on dogs and then see whether any adaptations are necessary for other species.
Current situation
In the United States, roughly 6.5 million animals are brought into a shelter each year. Only half of these pets get adopted, while roughly 25% are left to be euthanized. The question that raises itself, is why the majority of people get their cats and dogs from breeders or even “puppy mills”, instead of going to a shelter. In order to understand this better I looked at the problem from different sides.
Potential adopters
Even though the numbers for pet adoption through shelters are rising, there still are a lot of negative opinions surrounding shelter animals and their current environment. The following points came up during the interviews:
“There must be something wrong with them, otherwise they wouldn’t be in there.”
“Shelters are dirty and there are so many different animals living so close to each other. So if they weren’t sick before, they certainly are now.”
“I would not want someone else’s dog, it would never see me as its true owner.”
However, these opinions regarding behavior, health and loyalty of the animals are often complete myths and cases of misinformation.
If you adopt a young puppy, you have a lot of training and teaching exercises ahead of you, let alone housebreaking it. With adult animals, you can already see their true personality and they may even know some basic tricks.
Animal shelters often work very closely with veterinarians and most of their workers or volunteers are heavily experienced with animals. So most symptoms of illness are picked up early on and there are often regular medical checkups.
Regarding doubts in the loyalty of the pet, quite often the complete opposite is true. These animals are extremely grateful when a new person brings them into a loving environment and takes care of them.
In fact, there are several advantages that shelters have over breeders.
The people working or volunteering at the shelter have a lot of experience, so they will not only help you find the best match for you. They will also be very helpful during the entire process and afterwards may even support you in how to train your pet and what is important for it.
Shelter workers
Due to their personal experiences and the time they interact with each animal in their care, shelter workers have detailed information about the personality of the animals and know what the important factors for a new owner are. Often, they also know a lot more about the animals and their behavior than can be seen at first glance. For example, the most approachable and well behaved dog I met during my day at the shelter had a history of becoming extremely territorial after being re-homed and had already bitten several previous owners.
So whenever new potential adopters reach out to shelters, their workers and volunteers first want to find out more about the current situation of the other person, previous experience with animals, wishes for a new pet and how it would fit into their everyday life. The goal is to determine the potential fit between their pets and the new owner.
“I am a dog advocate, not a people advocate. Some people may find that uncooperative, but a rescue dog is not for everyone.”
“As an animal rescuer, you want to have control. You may have nursed the animal back from the streets or illness or injury. You want to know beyond any doubt what the home looks like.”
This part of the process can create a lot of tension. Potential adopters, who already decided they want to adopt from a shelter may feel interrogated and unfairly judged.
“When pets are easy to come by, it doesn’t make sense to push adopters away to the point that they’ll say: I don’t need your college-application process. I’ll go to the deli down the street and take that stray from the box.”
Another problem that occurs frequently is managing the expectations around the timeline and the necessary steps for an adoption.
“The biggest problem shelters face is people’s expectations of being able to walk into a rescue centre and pick up an animal then and there. That’s not how it works. It takes time.”
It became clear that for a solution that connects people looking for a new pet with their right companion, the role of the shelter workers has to be taken into account as well. They do play a central role in the process and we can use their knowledge as well as their general experience to help the potential adopter find their best match.
Pet Adoption Process
In order to gain a better understanding of the entire adoption process and verify that I take each individual step into account, I mapped out an overview.
The first step a person often takes is to do research about shelters and their available pets, e.g. via Google or their personal network. Afterwards, there will be a first contact with the shelter, either by calling them, going there directly or even reaching out via e-mail. During this first contact, the shelter workers try to get as much information on the hopes and expectations of the potential adopter as possible, either via questionnaires or interviews.
If there, the potential adopter then goes to the shelter to meet one or several of the animals he is interested in. The first contact between human and animal is essential. As the shelter workers often know their animals quite well, they can see whether there might be a good match, especially when it comes to dogs and their body language.
Additional steps after the initial meeting mainly depend on the type of animal and shelter. While in some circumstances, e.g. for rabbits or birds, the new owner can take the pet home directly, this is not as easy when it comes to dogs. Optional steps include a background check, e.g. making sure there are no known cases of animal abuse, or a home visit to make sure the new owner actually has the right environment and is equipped to take care of the dog. Most shelters also require the potential adopter to go for a walk with a dog one or multiple times and sometimes even have a mandatory cooling-off period to make sure that the new pets are not just an “impulse purchase”.
If everything goes well, the animal will then be given a final medical check, the new owner has to pay an adoption fee (from 5$ up to 500$, depending on type of animal, breed, age and shelter), sign the papers and then can finally take his new companion home.
Personas
As previously stated, both the potential adopter and the shelter worker have to be taken into account in order to guarantee the success of the new product. If certain aspects of an idea don’t align with the goals of the shelters, this might lead to them rejecting the new platform. For this reason I chose to create two personas.
When it comes to Personas, I intentionally avoid demographic details, as these don’t help me to understand or predict their behavior, but can lead to unwanted assumptions instead.
Andy (potential adopter)
“Growing up, I always had animals around me. I still remember the day I adopted Snowball, my first dwarf rabbit. And while we had fish, a turtle and two canaries, we never adopted a dog, because my mum was afraid of them. Since I never had the chance to interact with them, I also developed a fear of dogs and didn’t really know how to behave around them.
That all changed when I met Melissa. Her parents had a cute Havanese, Spotty, who was the most peaceful and relaxed dog on earth. As we lived close by, we often kidnapped him for a few days and I had the chance to learn how to give commands, go for walks and started to interact with dogs of various sizes.
So when Melissa and I moved to a new city for work a couple of weeks ago, we felt like there was something missing in our lives. As a software developer, I can work from home a lot of the time and Melissa only works part-time in a hospital. So we thought it would make sense to open our home for a dog of our own. With Spotty, I was always looking forward to our runs or walks, since it gave me a reason to get away from my laptop.
One of our first decisions was not to go to a breeder, as we were not set on a specific breed and rather wanted to save an animals life than support a system where people try to make money off of animals. Neither Melissa nor I have ever been to a shelter and we had no idea how things work there. The main thing I’m concerned about is how a dog from a shelter would react to Spotty, as he might be our overnight guest a couple of weekends per year while Melissa’s parents are traveling.
We‘ve already looked at websites for several of the shelters in our area, but we don’t even yet know what kind of dog would fit to us. Checking out different profiles and then discussing whether a dog that is only 9kg is better suited for us than one weighing 12kg feels superficial and more like shopping for new furniture, than finding a new companion. It doesn’t feel right.
I’m also getting the impression that the information on the websites is not updated regularly. And even if it were, most of the descriptions about a certain dog leave us with more questions than we had before. What does it tell me that the dog was given up by its owners? Why did they give it up? I know that I’m not getting a puppy with a blank slate, so I’d prefer to hear the real story, there’s no need to sugar-coat it. As someone who is completely new to owning a dog himself, I often feel like the descriptions of the dogs include certain terms or codewords that I have no clue about and only experienced dog owners can decipher.”
Sarah (Shelter worker)
“Oftentimes, the people who come to our shelter to look at dogs only already have their own ideas and hopes for their new pet. I wish they would just open their minds and spend more time here to actually get to know all the different personalities, instead of just finding the cutest-looking dog. What they also don’t understand, is that for shelter dogs, who are often already adults and may have a more complex history, the breed doesn’t say too much about an animal’s behavior.
That’s why I try to learn as much as possible about the people who are interested in adopting a dog beforehand, so I can lead them to the best match and what they are actually looking for. There are also certain aspects of a person’s personality and current situation, e.g. whether they have children or there are other animals in the family, which would exclude them from being a potential match for a certain dog.
It is very important to me to always be present when a potential adopter meets a dog for the first time. The way both the person and dog behave in that situation tells me so much about whether they would be a good fit. Even when visitors are just walking around our site on their own and check out all the different animals, I always have one eye on them to see how the animals are reacting to them. What these people often don’t know: the dogs are in a situation of incredible stress and behave differently inside the shelter, than they would on a walk with a potential owner or inside of a home. See that dog over there, barking at every visitor who strolls along his cage? He can be a real sweetheart and the most relaxed dog when he is with a new owner and not in a cage.”
Vision
With these insights in mind, I determined the high level goals of the new app. All subsequent steps will be based on the following ideas:
- The main goal is to find the right match between potential adopter and pet. The app is supposed to imitate the role of the shelter worker by figuring out their current situation, hopes and wishes and then presenting them with a choice of matching pets
- In order to convince potential adopters to choose animal shelters over breeders or to strength this existing preference, it’s key to educate about the shelters and their advantages.
- The third goal is to make it as easy and comfortable as possible for the potential adopters to actually go to a shelter and visit the dogs.
One aspect that may not be forgotten, is that I was supposed to interpret and design the app as a Google product. For this reason, I decided to not only follow the Material Design guidelines, but that I made sure my ideas are consistent with the general vision, design and branding of other Google apps.
User flow & Navigation
In order figure out how viable my solution would be, I developed a rough story in my mind on how Andy would use the app to find a new pet. As part of this exercise, I mapped out what kind of screens he would see.
Using this flow, I sketched out my first ideas of the main screens and how they would be connected. After a couple of iterations, I ended up with the following version.
While working on both the screen overview, as well as the sketches, I started to tinker with the navigation pattern I intended to use. The further I got with the sketches, the more I leaned towards a bottom navigation bar, due to the limited number of screens. In order to keep the navigation as simple as possible, I followed the famous saying of Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Both the navigation pattern, as well as what is being displayed in each tab is very similar to the “Google Arts & Culture” app. Both have “Favorites” and “Nearby” as tabs.
Wireframes
In order to demonstrate the entire user flow and experience, I will connect the wireframes to a story on how Andy and Melissa are using the app to find their new pet.
Onboarding
“It’s Sunday evening and Andy and Melissa have just come back from visiting Melissa’s parents and talk about how much they miss having Spotty, her parents dog, around. Once again they touch upon the subject of adopting a pet themselves. As it’s already late in the evening, they know they won’t be able to visit their local shelter, but Daniel, Andy’s colleague, had recommended they try the new “Google Pets” app.
Upon installing the app on Andy’s phone, they are first greeted by a screen that explains how they can use this app to find their new pet. They decide to go ahead and directly start the questionnaire that leads them through several questions about themselves, as well as what they hope for in a new companion. Upon completing the questions, they are redirected to a screen where they’re shown an analysis about what kind of dog would suit them.
After reading the results, Andy and Melissa discuss the analysis. They are a bit unsure on what is considered a “medium-sized” dog, so they open the detailed explanation.”
In order to give an introduction into what the app is capable of, I chose to start off with the Top User Benefits. At this stage, it is important to not only explain how the app works, but also to make clear why learning more about the potential adopter is essential in order to unlock the full potential of the app.
To determine which topics should be included in the questionnaire, I conducted informal brainstorming sessions with shelter workers to hear more about what kind of questions they usually ask. These primarily included:
- Type of pet
- Experience with owning pets and dogs in particular
- Current living situation
- Work situation / time available
- Potential excluding factors (children and/or other animals)
- Hopes and expectations (e.g. kind of activities or specific breed)
The general idea is to focus first on the potential adopter himself, in order to filter out dogs where certain circumstances could create problems. In the end, the user has the option to disclose his current preferences for a new companion.
There is a big difference between the questionnaire in this app and the typical “Dog Breed Selector” quizzes. These usually try to cover as many questions as possible in order to present the one perfect breed. For the app in this design exercise, the goal is to present a range of suitable pets, sorted by match, where the user can learn more about their stories and personalities.
After completing the questionnaire, the user will be presented with a summary of insights based on his answers, so that he can both understand why these were important, as well as what kind of criteria will be used when looking for potential matches.
Explore & Favorite
“Upon finishing the questionnaire, Andy and Melissa now arrive at the list of matching dogs. They decide to just scroll through the list and check out the details and stories of different dogs. One dog in particular, Skipper, has found his way into their heart with his story. Andy and Melissa had initially added Skipper to their favorites and they often came back to his detail page to check out his photos again.”
As I will go further into detail about the “Explore” tab in the High-Fidelity Design section of this exercise, I will limit myself to the “Favorites” tab for now. Even though the ability to save and highlight certain dogs is nothing spectacular and very common in these kind of apps,, it is an integral part for the experience of this app. As research uncovered, the adoption process often takes way longer than one would expect and it is not guaranteed that a dog that looks like a great fit in the app would actually respond well to the user in person. Having the option to go back to a list of potentially interesting dogs can thus be extremely helpful.
Dog details
In the detail screen for any dog, my general vision was to highlight the story of each individual dog while avoiding numbers, stats and generalizations as much as possible. This was due to two reasons:
- Storytelling is a great technique to make people fall in love with a dog. Stats should only be used to filter out certain dogs, e.g. because of their size. And thanks to the initial questionnaire, the users won’t need to do so anymore, as the dogs already fit their criteria.
- Dogs in animal shelters often have rather complex stories and sometimes also challenging personalities due to their history. So it is far more important to talk about what is important for each individual dog, instead of focussing on the breed.
Next to the focus on the story, it was important to me to present the user with as much visual content as possible. Doing so would not only strengthen the connection they build up to these pets, but also help reduce the prejudices against pets from animal shelters. resenting videos of the dogs interacting with the shelter workers or running around in the play area of the shelters could have a great influence here.
Another essential aspect of this site is the option to directly schedule a visit. This is one of the main advantages of the app to its competitors and also the shelters own websites, so I wanted to make this step of the process easily accessible and place it in a prominent position.
As the last part of this screen, I decided to include general information about the shelter and a link to its detail page as well, so that anyone interested can easily find out more.
Scheduling a visit
“The shelter Skipper currently lives in is not too far away, so they decide to drive there next week. As a next step, they check out available times and schedule a visit. On the next launch of their app, they can now see their scheduled visit with Skipper on top of the list of matching dogs.”
For the design of scheduling an appointment, I had to find a way to highlight both the available dates and times, as Material Design does not have this interaction included in the date and time picker components. Two apps that inspired me, since they are doing a great job in that regard, are Airbnb (available dates) and Calendly (available times).
Appointments
How to design the interaction of scheduling a visit turned out to be the toughest part of the entire exercise. My initial idea was to start this process from the dog detail page and then move over to a tab where private messages between potential adopters and shelters would be displayed. Yet since the only Google apps that actually allow private messages between two members are solely designed for this purpose (e.g. Hangouts and Allo), I decided to find another way to solve this problem. My next step was to reach out to one of the shelter workers again. In order to gain new insights, I asked him to go more into further detail about what is important to the shelter when they’re contacted by potential adopters.
The feedback I received uncovered that this shelter worker and his colleagues actually found communicating with potential adopters via an app quite annoying. By avoiding a private messaging feature, I would stick to the way Google designs apps, while building a better product for one of my user groups all at once.
Still, scheduled visits were a high priority to me, as the final goal of this app is to find the one perfect dog for the potential adopter and not just browse around and discover new content for a couple of weeks. During my research on how other Google apps solve this problem, I came across an interaction in Google Play Books, where any books that are added to the Library stick to and expand the toolbar. This pattern served as inspiration for my own solution.
Shelters
“Checking out the different dogs and their stories, Andy and Melissa become more and more enthusiastic about the prospect of adopting a dog. As both of them are free the next day, they decide to not only look for dogs in the app, but also to visit at least one shelter, so they check out which ones are close by.“
As the functionality within the “Nearby” tab is a very typical pattern of showing both a map and a list of locations, I looked at how other Google apps already solve this. I decided to take over the general idea from the “Google Arts & Culture” app and adapt it to my context. This adaptation does a great job communicating which shelters are close by, while displaying the matching pets in their care as well.
For the detail page of these shelters, it was important for me to start off with visual content in order to give anyone interested a good look into how the animals are actually living there and what kind of care they receive. Next to general and essential details on the location and visiting hours, I also introduced a “Story” tab, to give the shelters the option to show and tell a bit more about their organization. At this point, aspects from other products in the Google ecosystem, e.g. a virtual reality tour or being able to explore the place in Street View, would be great ideas to make this feature highly entertaining.
Notifications
“When the day to meet Skipper finally arrives, Andy receives a notification in the morning, so he opens the app, double checks the location and directions on how to get there to make sure they arrive on time.”
During the phone call with one of the shelter workers on how to communicate with potential adopters, I noticed a lot of frustration about missed appointments without giving notice beforehand. In order to tackle this problem, I added notifications that would remind the user shortly before any scheduled visit.
Notifications also play an important role to inform the user about dogs who are just being handed over to the shelter and that fit his criteria. In the animal shelter environment, it often comes down to a couple of days to decide whether a dog will get adopted, stay in the care of the shelter, or be euthanized.
However, these notifications have to be well designed. Instead of “There are 7 new matching pets for you”, the notification should directly play on what is important to the user and feel personal, e.g. “Still looking for a running buddy? Blitz is new at PAWS Chicago and would love to meet you!”.
High Fidelity Designs
For the overall style of the new Google Pets app, I intended to stick to the general Material Design guidelines. In order to see how these guidelines are currently being interpreted by the Google Design team, I tested a wide selection of Google apps.
The first thing that caught my eye was a move towards a lighter, more minimalistic design instead of previously used bright colors. Good examples in that regard are “Google Home”, “YouTube” and even the “Google” app itself.
Regarding the content of the “Explore” tab, I aimed to make the dogs’ pictures the center of attention. Upon completing the questionnaire, the user would be directed to the screen, as can be seen above, where he can easily scroll through a list of matches without being distracted by too many options or other information. Further down in the screen, he would then discover additional content, that will be explained in detail in the following section.
The example in the two phones show the “Explore” tab, as it would appear on the first launch of the app. The longer version to the left is more representative of what the typical content in the “Explore” tab would look like after several days of active use.
At the top, there is a horizontal list of scheduled visits. Since the user will know these animals somewhat better by this time, the details are limited to their name and the date and time of the visit.
As previously mentioned, getting dogs adopted as quickly as possible is critical for animal shelters. In order to achieve this, while also keeping the content of the app fresh, the next segment highlights dogs that were recently taken into care.
A primary goal of this app was to educate about shelters. One idea that can help in this regard, that was shortly mentioned in the wireframes, is the integration of Street View in order to get an inside view of shelters. The full-width size of the image draws additional attention. Another purpose this design could serve, is to give information about the advantages of shelters or highlight dogs that are tougher to place.
Finally, the last part of this screen features the start of the list “running buddies”, dogs that would enjoy going for a morning run with their new owner. This is possible, due to the great advantage of this app — we already know a lot about the preferences of the user from the beginning. By giving him a choice of dogs that highlight a certain criteria which he deemed important, there is a higher chance the user will want to learn more about these dogs. Once the user notices that his answers in the questionnaire influence the content, the probability of him providing more information will increase even further.
There are two ways to make a person fall in love with a pet. Naturally, the appearance plays a huge role and is the #1 factor when it comes to choosing a pet. The second way is creating a story around the dog that communicates his personality and tells you what makes him special. Storytelling also aids the overall goal of moving the focus away from numbers or breed characteristics, towards the individual personality and history of the dog.
That’s why when navigating to the detail page of a dog, the only hard facts are age, breed, sex and distance to current shelter. All of these are visible at first glance to give a quick overview that is followed up by links to share the dog details, schedule a visit or get directions to the shelter.
The vast majority of the site will contain the individual story of the dog, as well as pictures and videos when available. The only additional information, that can be found at the bottom of the page, are contact details for the current shelter of the dog.
In order to be able to combine both text and image while still ensuring enough contrast for the text, I added a gradient overlay on top of the image.
While the example of the larger version of the dog details page to the left features a picture in the middle of the story, this element could just as well be another kind of multimedia content. Possible options, that also make use of other Google products, would be a YouTube video or a Virtual Reality walk through the forest or along a street together with Skipper, in order to paint a realistic picture of how the dog would behave under these circumstances.
The text for this part of the story was copied verbatim from the original “PAWS Chicago” website, since they are definitely one of the leaders of their industry in that regard. What can be seen quite well is how essential high quality content is, both for the images, as well as the story. Thus, it will be necessary to set some supporting guidelines or find ways to help the shelters create both entertaining and informative content.
Limitations
There are four aspects I would love to dive deeper into for the further improvement of the app.
Right now, most of the story for the new app revolves around how potential adopters would use it. Looking at it from the perspective of the people working in the shelter brings many new, interesting challenges with it. Similar to e.g. Yelp, who have one app for customers and one for the restaurants, there would have to be a separate app for the people on the other side of the interaction. Aspects that this second app would have to excel in are:
- Helping shelter workers with the creation of high quality content (e.g. text, photos, videos, VR tours).
- Synchronization with different calendars for the scheduled visits.
- Extracting valuable information from stories and additional data to connect to the preferences of potential adopters.
And even though my persona lives together with his girlfriend, they’re only using the app on one phone at a time and rely heavily on the sharing and liking functionalities to communicate with each other and organize their search. Finding better ways to enable multiple users to look for a new pet together could be very valuable for couples or families.
As mentioned in the beginning, my ideas for the new app are mostly tied to the context people looking to adopt dogs. Going into detail about how to adapt the app for adopters that are e.g. looking to adopt a rabbit or haven’t decided on a type of animal, would uncover new challenges.
Finally, the current solution only takes the very first steps of the entire adoption process into account. It would be interesting to see a first version of the app in action, in order to investigate whether integrating subsequent steps could be beneficial to the overall success of the app and it’s main goal to simplify the pet adoption process, leading more potential adopters away from breeders or “puppy mills”.
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