Designing for a Niche
Case Study: Pawseekr UI Library (fictional)
This week at RED we were put into teams of two. Renato and I were a team (see Renato’s work here) and we had to present our different art directions for the same company by the end of the week.
Pawseekr (fictional) is a dog adoption app targeted towards 25 to 35 year-old professionals in the creative or community-related industries.
Tools Used: Sketch, InVision
Idea Dump
My process started with pursuing the traditional image of family/cute dogs. I thought about fresh and energetic colours, but my initial colour scheme (below: style tile v1) didn’t have any harmony at all.
So, I tried to simplify the colours and make them a little more approachable and cohesive (below: style tile v2). The problem was, it was a very similar art direction to my partner’s, and I couldn’t shake the thought that the design wouldn’t do older dogs any justice.

I needed to refine my target market, but I got carried away with the thought of “what if Wonder Woman needed a dog companion/side kick because her boyfriend just died”. She wasn’t the target market, and style tile v3 (below) really shows that. It was much too serious.

I wanted to keep the primary colours, because they’re familiar to the target market and I wanted to gear my focus more towards the people who are fans of Wonder Woman and all things animation, superhero and comic book.
Luckily The Game Grumps were having their fifth year anniversary, and they really realigned my focus. They’ve grown from two guys on a couch, to a full fledged company with a following of over 3 million subscribers , and a community full of artists. This community was my target market.
The goal was to make a dog adoption app more personable. So I wanted to make one that would really emulate the style of that community. It’s fun, dynamic, bubbly, and super animated.





Try it out here.
Other Considerations
A dog adoption app is an interesting concept, because it’s such a heavily involved purchase.
From a UX perspective, the wireframe could be a case study all on its own in terms of reasoning behind some buttons and screens, but from a UI study it was great to have to design for all the different elements.