by Yan Cheng
Brainstorming the idea
We start with the idea that our website will be functioning in not only lost and found but also pets adoption. From our own experience, we believe people may prefer calling animal shelter or distributing flyers when their pets are lost and they would usually contact animal rescue when they see homeless dogs on street. So we like to know the reason behind and to see how we can make our website more user-attracting and user-friendly.
Designing interview questions
When designing the interview questions, we thought giving a brief introduction of our project will be helpful for our interviewees to not only understand the questions but also raise their interest in talking about their experience and thoughts. The main part of the interview will focus on what people will do and why they choose such method when they lose pets, see homeless pets or plan to adopt pets. In the very end we would also like to ask our interviewees if they have any suggestions on our project and what their requirement of our website will be.
Our first interviewee Professor Boyle not only gave us great delights on our projects but also helped us eliminate unnecessary part in our project — adoption functionality. Thus right after interviewed her, our group had a group discussion on our goals and we decided to delete the adoption part on our website as well as eliminate those questions about adoption in our interview questions. Below is our final version of interview questions.
Interviewing
We decided to interview 2 to 3 people per member and each will be targeting certain category of people.
All of us will be interviewing pet owners. Three of us will be interviewing people who walk dog and who purchase pet supply in PetSmart and people who are crazy pet lovers. We will also use popular chatting applications like “Facebook” and “WeChat” for interviewing. The remaining two members will specifically target pet owners who once lost pets before or saw homeless pets on the street. As mentioned in the “What to do in Need Finding”, stories “are a good tool for building empathy making meaning.” We will start by asking them if they ever lost a pet or if they have ever heard of someone who lost pets. Such memory can greatly increase interviewees’ interests in our project and they also have a lot of valuable experience for our project. One of the most helpful suggestion from the reading should be “allow for silence”. It is very usual that our interviewees will stop and think for a long time. Being patient is really important at that moment and giving them respect and space to think can bring them a more friendly and “safe” environment to talk.
Need-finding
We are very confident in our project at the beginning because we think we are providing enough functions for pet lovers and our website can attract a wide range of pet lovers. However, our very first interviewee changes our point of view greatly. She pointed out that in order for her to be confident in our project, we should probably focus on only one type of pets such as only dogs. She also expressed her concern about our adoption feature because for her, the lost and found feature was the one that drew her attention while the adoption feature confused her about the ultimate goal of our project. Just like the Zoomer, we find out that our potential users are looking for a rather simple but specialized website and we decide to delete the adoption feature as well as limiting pet types to dogs.
Other interviewees also delight us with various needs they prefer. The most mentioned ones are authority and popularity. The former makes people feel safe when posting their personal information while the latter gives them confidence in searching for the missing dogs or the owners. Also, some interviewees said they really needed to know where people see homeless dogs to effectively shrink down the searching range. Others said they needed more convenient ways to be notified when a pet was lost in the neighborhood because they were not very likely to go online and search if there was any pets lost just in the neighborhood. One interviewee has strong concern with our database because our database may start empty and is not helpful in finding lost pets.
Competitive analysis of existing applications based on the key needs
For competitive analysis phase, we recognized three potential competitors. sddac.com is the webpage of San Diego county animal service which is a government-supported animal service center. According to the key needs, they have a really large database. Also, many of our interviewees said the website needs to be authentic. Indeed, the sddac.com not only shows authenticity but it also has certain authority in the area of animal service. However, as we looking at their lost and found forms, there are only three options for location and there is no breed information on the form, thus the search can be really unspecified. Also, the website has too many functionalities which makes it not specialized in lost and found. Moreover, after submitting the lost and found form, users do not get directed to their database to see if there are any matches.
The second website we choose is pawboost.com which is a very specialized lost and found page for dogs. It can be the most competitive applicant for our website. We find out that this website has vast shelter connections which satisfies users’ need on a large database. The main page is very straightforward as well. The website can also connect to Facebook which can satisfy user’s needs for notification. However, as many potential users are concerned, authority and authenticity can be hard to achieve. Same as sddac.com, the website also lacks of the functionality to report missing dogs’ breed, size and age information. In addition, this website’s database has information about both cats and dogs which does not satisfy our interviewee’s needs on specialization.
The third website is cragislist.org which is mentioned by multiple interviewees. One of the needs from our interviewees is that the website should have a large population and cragislist.org greatly satisfy this requirement because it has hundreds of thousands of active participants. However, the website is not very user-friendly and users need to take multiple steps to post lost and found posts. A lot of the post titles are very vague and lacks specification of the pets. This will waste a lot of time and effort for the users when they search for owners or missing pets.
For our project, we will definitely learn from our competitors’ advantages and we will also try to eliminate those drawbacks we gathered from the interviews. We are going to brainstorm more to make our project more successful and competitive.
