Influencing E-Commerce: DogTown

Nina Lombardo
Nov 4 · 8 min read

Case Study


Week 2 at Ironhack was challenging, fast paced, and most of all, worth it! Our class was tasked with improving the online shopping experiences for a real life business; therefore, we set out to find a local business that would be willing to share some insights. Our hope was to find a company that was exciting and filled with life. Lo and behold, we found Dogtown, Brickell. I mean, what’s filled with more life and love than a business centered to working with dogs?

DogTown is a co-owned company that is an all-inclusive free-roaming Miami Dog Hotel, fun-filled day care, and groomers. Their first location was opened in Coconut Grove in 2013 and they opened a second location in Brickell in 2019. The owners wanted to create a place where they would trust even their own dogs to go.

The website at first glance was outdated, unprofessional and really could use a UX/UI designers help. Our goal was to design a mobile first, user-centered website aiming to improve DogTown’s online presence and to incorporate some new best practices based on our market research.

Current Website

Pre Determined Goals

Our goal for this project was to better understand the South Florida dog service market, their users, and implement a better online check out service that would increase the company’s customer base, which would then ideally lead to increased profits. My teammate and I wanted to bring this dog loving company into a whole new light: a young, hip and modern experience allowing their users to have an efficient and effective online experience.

The Scope

Once we selected DogTown, we set out to meet with the company owner to get some insight; however, due to her time availability, we weren’t able to get in touch with her. Instead, we ended up meeting with a DogTown employee. Most importantly we wanted to hear from customers themselves, as well as other dog service users. Lastly, we set tasks for our users to accomplish on the company website, as well as conducted our own secondary research on the company’s top competitors.

Research and Discovery

During the research and discovery phase we compared DogTown to several of their South Florida competitors, some being a franchise and others, a mom and pop shop, in order to truly see where DogTown aligned in the market. Through the Competitive Feature Comparison Chart, we were better able to cross compare different aspects of all the companies. The most predominant features were their social media platforms, the navigability of their website, and ease of checkout.

Competitive Feature Comparison Chart,

Through the Market Positioning we learned what the untouched market that DogTown could tap in to was: their Blue Ocean would be innovation and luxury.

We interviewed 1 DogTown employee, 5 dog service users, and 3 website test users. It was evident that all users who went onto the company website were confused, frustrated and not impressed. One of DogTown’s current customers, walked us though her checkout process and expressed her frustrations and desires for improvement.

Through the research process we were able to flush out our affinity map which helped us get to our synthesis and discovers which were, professionalism, lack of communication, pricing/information, and financial management. We were then able to dig into our User Persona which helped us create a mental model of what the customers needed, to then create a User Journey Map that helped us pin point the users highs and lows.

Affinity Map

The Site Map, Task Analysis, and Heuristic Analysis helped us hone in on the root of the website issues. It showed us exactly where there was room for improvement. With the website being so outdated and not user friendly it was hard to narrow down which points we were going to really focus on, because to us, they were all important and would all create a huge impact on the business.

AHA moments & Solution

The first aha moment was when we came to find out that there was no login/create account button for the customers. They have to sign in through a “learn more” button. Secondly, we realized that they aren’t active on their social media; meanwhile, all our interviewees said they would like a dog facility that had a feature that would allow them to check up on their dogs throughout the day.

After all the research and discovery, we found where the website really needed to be targeted to in order to make the most efficient and effective changes. We then asked ourselves:

  • How might we improve site navigation when scrolling through the website?
  • How might we make the user feel updated while they are away?
  • How might we help communication between user & company when they have questions?
  • How might we help alleviate the users stress/frustrations when trying to find information

We ideated and thought of countless fixes to the problem, but exactly which ones would be the most effective? We used the Moscow Method to finalize the best features and ideas.

A mobile first, user centered website that features a homepage with direct access to DogTown’s Instagram stories, incorporates a navigation menu with the options to checkout as a guest and quickly book appointments through auto filled payment information would be the first steps to fixing the companies online presence.

Flow, Design Patterns, UI Choices

The original mobile website was confusing, unorganized and illegible, so we geared our Low- Fidelity Wireframes to focus on clarity. We wanted the mobile site to be easy to read, make the users feel like the site is effortless to navigate, and increase efficiency and effectiveness.

We started out the wireframes with a broken down home page, listing locations, services, questions and contact information. A drop down menu on the top right corner for additional information would leave for a clean and crisp home page.

The homepage’s purpose was to focus on services and locations since that is usually the reason users are coming on to the site. If a current customer was going on the site, they would probably be going to the booking section, hence why services is listed right off the bat. If the client was new, they would be looking for details on services and locations- the locations page leads them to the services page once they make their location section.

Once the users were able to search through all the services, they would then be led to “booking”. The wireframes have required information to be filled out, which leads the user to “check out as a guest” or to “login to their account”. We purposely added the “checkout as guest” option since oftentimes people prefer not to sign up for websites.

A total of 7 users were given the task to “Book a Dog Hotel Stay at the Brickell Location and to check out as a guest” — there were only 5 mis-clicks on the entire process based on all 7 users. Through observing testers, the heat mapping technique, and interviews, we saw that there was some room for improvement for our Low- Fidelity wireframes. We needed to create a back button just in case they wanted to get out of the check-out service, we also realized users didn’t know they had to input their name, pet, and personal information in the checkout process, so we wanted to make this more clear on our Mid- Fidelity.

Our Mid- Fidelity wireframes accomplished the task of easy navigation in order to help customer check out quickly, incorporating a check mark icon that helped the shopper indicate what step of the booking process the customer was on, as well as a way to exit out of the booking process. Users could also sign in if they pleased and have their credit card already linked to their account so they wouldn’t have to go through the process every time. Ultimately, we were able to incorporate an Instagram social media icon so guests could check on their dogs through DogTown’s Instagram feed throughout the day.

Mid- Fidelity Wireframes

Conclusion

To conclude, we would like to increase DogTown’s success, we will know we are successful when there are:

  • Quicker online checkout times,
  • Task completion rate,
  • And an increase of online booking.

Narrowing down the most influential features for the company was the most difficult part, but we were able to include the features we deemed necessary for the E-commerce success for DogTown. Nowadays, everything is done virtually, and not many people want to pay for their dogs stay in person every single time they pick up their dog, rather than just making the reservation and paying online.

After Thoughts

Week 2 was a roller coaster of emotions, it was more challenging than week 1 but ended on a high note. If my teammate and I were to implement these tools in real life, I would find it to be important that our next steps would be to dig deeper into the untapped market and discover more of our “Blue Ocean” of Innovation and Luxury. We would like to meet with the stakeholder, since she was unavailable during our timeline. We would like to get her perspective of the business and what we think she as an owner sets them apart.

Currently the domain name is different than the business name, so we would suggest the business makes the domain name uniformed in order to create more website traffic.

Overall DogTown is a successful business, but there is so much room for growth, especially with these easy fixes. According to Chrysislis Communication Blog, in the digital age, “Online marketing is extremely important for all businesses because it has a huge influence on the way consumers make purchasing decisions…. An online presence is one of the most important investments that a business can make” — and I couldn’t agree more!


We’d love to get your feedback on our Mid-Fidelity wireframing - DogTown Wireframe.

Nina Lombardo

Written by

Lover of all things design | Former Event Planner, Future UX/ UI Designer

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade