Case study: Designing to help animals. 🐈 🐕

7 min readSep 8, 2020

Why animal shelters?

We wanted that the theme should be helping a cause that would need it.
The European Union estimates that there are about 100.000.000 (one hundred million) abandoned companion animals in Europe. Both of us have adopted shelter cats and wanted to help the shelters furthermore.

Andrea’s cats Taylor and Luna, and Claudia’s cat Pan.

Why a design sprint?
A design sprint was a good framework for quick research and validate through testing that typically takes 5 days. Our “Summer Design Sprint” took a bit longer; you can see the process here: Miro Board

We documented our process on a daily journal:

Day #1

We started to dive in the process, setting up everything we needed to start:

Establishing the project’s long Term Goal
The goal of this project was to help shelters in two ways: Increasing the animal’s adoptions and the amount of donations.
After writing the sprint questions, we realized that to convince people to adopt and donate we had to make them empathize with the shelter and their work, making visible the animals that needed help.
How Might We?
We thought that both donations and adoptions were equally important for the wellbeing of the animals and the shelters.
LEAN UX Survey
We designed the survey using the LEAN UX Survey Canvas. This helped us to define what we need to learn, who to learn from, where to find them, and which questions to ask.

You can see this process on the Miro Board

Day #2

Understanding the users:

Survey (74 people)
Focus Group — In-Person (6 people)
Interview (3 people)
Talking to specialists (Shelter volunteer, Veterinarian)

On the second day, we sent the survey, and posted it in shelter and animal-related subreddits, and waited for the results. The survey could be answered by people who had adopted pets or not, but we only interviewed people who have had adopted pets. You can check it here: Survey

Meanwhile, Andrea did a focus group in the mountains (of course keeping social distance), with 6 people who were either dog or cat owners. There was a shelter volunteer among them she explained to us about the importance of foster homes for pets who have surgery and senior pets. the low amount of donations, and above all the importance of having responsible people committed to taking care of the animal. Also, she explained how the fact of being a volunteer teaches you about empathy and responsibility.

A fluid conversation walking in the mountain with animal owners.

Claudia interviewed 2 people and her sister, who is a veterinarian in Venezuela. Having adopted and fostered several cats herself, she gave us insight about the character and personality of the pets, and how sometimes newly adopted shelter pets need ethological support (advice about the behavior of the animal) can help both the owner and the recently adopted pet.

Day #3

Understanding the competition and context

Benchmarking
Moodboard

While people were answering the survey, we started looking at different local shelters and adoption websites, both local and not.

We started to understand the information architecture of other websites, their user flow, and how they presented their pets. We started to detect patterns in the way they display the information and the user flow, and detected what we wanted to improve:

Prioritizing the adoption of the pets who need it (senior and urgent adoptions).
Displaying how people could help, and encouraging them to propose their ways to help, making the volunteer experience more flexible and helpful for all.
The site had to be simple, clear, and friendly enough, prioritizing the pets above anything else.

Creating a visual identity that transmits joy and happiness was important to us. The moodboard express the feeling we wanted to transmit.

Mood board. Pictures of happy people and animals over vivid solid colors.

Day #4

Gathering insights and reframing the problem

Survey Results
Interview Results
Affinity Diagram
Organizing HMW

After several days we got 70 answers.
You can see our key findings in the Miro Board.

Biggest concerns about adopting:

Not having enough time to be with the pet 42,6%
The new pet not getting along with the other pet 34%
Not having enough money to support them 31,9%

Aspects of the animal taken into consideration:

The personality of the animal 68,1%
Age 44,7%
Size 42,6%

Correlation between adoption and donation:

80% of adopters have contributed or donated to the shelter.
63% non-adopters have not.

The main reason to not adopt a pet (44%) was living in a place where the pet can’t live, for diverse reasons (space, landlord, etc.). Even though the majority of non-adopters have considered adopting a pet at some moment (81,5%).

We created an Affinity Diagram to visualize the patterns between the answers of the interviewees. This helped us gather our insights.

1. Correlation between adoptions and donations/volunteering.

It made sense to create a website in which adopters would empathize with the pet and their needs, thus allowing them to donate and volunteer.

2. Pet compatibility.

In the words of one of the interviewees: “When adopting an animal, the most important thing is being aware of the kind of animal you are adopting, and being conscious of both the pet and owner’s needs”.

In the case of time and money concerns, the personality of the pet is important. The time and money you invest in a pet are related to its energy, age, breed, or health conditions. For instance, a person with not a lot of time or money can benefit from a senior cat instead of a kitten.

We included a compatibility test and designed filter categories according to the survey data. This data also helped us prioritize the information displayed for each pet.

3. Flexible activities

Interviewees expressed having a work schedule or lifestyle that made volunteering difficult. They also mentioned that participating in events could help the shelters to make the pets visible and educate the population while being a great opportunity to meet more people.

We decided to offer flexible options to volunteer, foster, and help, encouraging the people to propose their own ideas.

After the research, we also created user personas to express the motivations of our users and keep them in mind while designing.

Day #5

Defining the solution

We created User Stories for adoption, volunteering, and donation flows. Later, we started sketching several solutions.

Claudia’s and Andrea’s Lightening demos.

Day #6

Prototyping

Day 6 is a lie, sorry. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We were aware that the quality of the feedback was proportional to the quality of the prototype, so we decided to take the necessary time prototyping (at least 2 weeks) to create the best experience for the user without jeopardizing the quality of the design.

A video showing the prototype.

We also created a design system, something vital for us to keep everything organized and coherent.

You can test the prototype by yourself following this link.

Day #7

Testing: Validating the solution

Our favorite part. We tested the prototype with 4 people and evaluated the results on a score from 1 to 5.

A testing session with our developer friend Edgar.

Day #8

Refining the prototype

The scorecard was an objective approach that allowed us to identify and fix key issues. You can see it on our Miro board.

We took into account observations from the testers, such as explaining more clearly the purpose of the website, the need to specify the location of the pet, explaining how the donation money would be used and improving the compatibility test.

Compatibility test, redesigned.

Day #9

Last thoughts and publishing the results.

After finishing the project, we thought about the things we could improve in the future:

Include a section for the different shelters describing their projects and needs, so people would know where the money from the donations go.
Improve the donation system: give the user the option to choose between different shelters and projects.
Categorize and display graphically the different personalities of the pets.