Designing For an On-Demand Pet Care Service: Urban Leash
Urban Leash is a Chicago start-up that helps busy professionals find daily and last minute dog-walking and cat-sitting services. With instant check in/out notifications, live GPS tracking, service notes and pictures, customers can rest assured their pets are in great hands. They operate similarly to Uber in that their customers are pet owners who need dog walking and cat sitting services. They enter a request and are matched up with the best available walker.
Task
- Make significant improvement and enhancements to our customer-facing experience. The goal is to add additional transparency to the service (like being able to select and interact with individual dog walkers) and improve the overall utility of our mobile offering.
- The second part involves creating the tools that our pet care workers want to self-manage their clients. This involves enhancing the dog walkers existing interaction with the Urban Leash platform through our mobile and web apps.
Role: Researcher, Designer, Service Designer, iOS app form design.
Constraint: 21 days.
Process:
Stakeholder Interview:
We met with Lina and Demetri, founders of Urban Leash, to discuss the company and to learn more about their brand. They are two bright individuals that are fully immersed in their business and know the market. Demetri made us aware of the problems he had intended to fix with the app, specifically the feature that clients use to request a recurring-order (multiple bookings within the week or month). They also felt there was an opportunity to pivot and create more business by giving their pet care providers the tools needed to manage their own book of clients. This was an idea, and they hadn’t done research to see if it were plausible, so we agreed to dedicate time to investigate. To end, we clarified the objectives and informed them of the UX Design process that we would be applying, and thanked them for the opportunity to work with together.
Research:
My team and I started off by mapping out the audience we wanted to gather insight from. There were many user groups that varied from potential users to active users, and dog walkers to pet owners (not to mention the subgroups of customers they had using the service). I created a competitive analysis spreadsheet to better understand the market and see where Urban Leash lay. It was a lot to cover so we divided the work to be more efficient. We wrote surveys, planned interviews, gathering secondary data and created user flows. It was overwhelming at first learning all of Urban Leash’s touch points that it has within itself and the market, and we used whiteboards to map out the service from both the customer-side as well as the employee-side.
- We surveyed 96 people: We surveyed pet owners, Urban Leash Employees, active customers, inactive customers, and freelance dog walkers not associated with any company or business. It was nice to have an english/grammar major as a teammate to make sure the survey and interview questions were not leading and eliminate any bias.
- We interviewed 19 of those 96 people surveyed to find out more about their responses and thoughts on the subject.
- (INSIGHT)Interviews and survey results suggested that Urban Leash walkers viewed managing their own clients as unimportant and not as desired as our stakeholders thought.
- Observed Johnathan, an Urban Leash dog walker, for a day.
- A competitive analysis chart on Urban Leash and it’s competitors can be seen below:
Analysis:
Our first step once all of the research has been collected is to affinity map it on post it notes to help organize and map out any trends or patterns within the data.
Throughout all of our research each one of us had the opportunity to draw some insights from people we spoke with and the responses from the surveys helped string together a story. We created 6 personas, which were based off of the user groups we surveyed. Each persona resonates the attitudes, behaviors, and patterns we found in the research.
For example, a number of respondents selected trusting a stranger in their house was a their primary concern — one of the personas will be looking for a “trustworthy” pet care service with a safe system in place for walkers entering their home. An example persona from our project can be seen in Figure 4. User personas are used in the experience design process to simulate a journey behind the eyes of the business’s target audience. Designers take these “people” into account when choosing information architecture, so that the right content finds their eyes easily and intuitively.
Findings:
The recurring feature that Urban Leash provides for pet owners who want to order multiple dog-walks at once was difficult to understand and even more difficult to use. Along side more functionality and experience design flaws in the process, there was a lot of positive data. Urban leash’s current strengths are its ability to provide a working on-demand service. Other competitors are more of a “select your walker from a list of profiles and try and get in touch with them.” Urban leash also has extremely caring employees. There were many tear jerking stories told to us about walkers going above and beyond for the dogs they care for, especially ones with poor health!
A major difficulty Urban leash has yet to solve is creating a seamless solution for getting walkers and customers to develop a plan to provide access to the walkers while the owners are gone.
Stakeholder meeting #2:
We met with Lina and Demetri near week 2 to present our research to them, and collaborate in an Ideating Session. The findings we presented them were not un-heard; A lot of our data pointed out pain points that Demetri had already known existed. Though, our research on walkers managing/on-boarding their own clients revealed that their employees never felt that they needed to gather outside business; Urban Leash always fills jobs for their walkers, so they don’t find it necessary to invest time in on-boarding. It was after we discussed that further, that Demetri suggested we focus on the user experience on the mobile and website in our design. This changed the original objectives slightly by side-barring the design of employees on-boarding their own clients.
We moved onto the Ideation Session, where we introduced Demetri and Lina to our user personas and their corresponding pain points. We ideated around how we can solve the pain points experienced by the personas and convert them into happy customers. This exercise helps encourage critical thinking and problem solving with people outside of the team. It helps get a fresh set of thoughts and ideas from outside the box that a team is operating in.
Design:
With our list of ideas, my group and I debated which ones we should incorporate into our solution. Our design directions were clear:
- Enhance the user experience for both the customer-facing app and walker-facing app.
- Highlight Urban Leash’s strengths.
- Capitalize on opportunities to build trust.
Feature Selection:
With a laundry list of ideas, we debated which ones fit within our scope, ability, and design directions. Our team broke up the parts we decided to work on a set off to design → test → iterate. Our user testing helped us get feedback and refine the product.
When deciding who would work on what, I jumped on the opportunity to practice my service design techniques. I wanted to somehow improve the process of an Urban Leash walker getting into the customers home. The majority of frustration was felt at high rise residential buildings. The walkers were spending more time inside the lobby and elevators than they did with the pet. With that in mind, I began a rough sketch of a lock box that could be placed conveniently in the high rise lobby, and would help lower the time spent interacting with the front desk personal. You can see the sketch done below in figure 6. In addition to the problems faced getting in, many walkers experienced times where they had to scour the owner’s home for all of the pet’s supplies (leash, food, medicine, etc). I had designed a tote bag to be given to new users for holding all of the pet’s supplies and could be hung in a visible spot.
Testing these on some pet owners and residents of high rises, I got some pretty good feedback. In regards to the Tote bag, there was value seen. Many owners said they liked the brand awareness it brings and also is something they could easily hang in their corridor. The lock box’s testing brought up a good point: if the walker has access to a lock box full of keys, what’s to say he or she doesn’t grab someone’s key and break in. An iteration of the lock box was a more advanced prototype with internal key code separators. This would ensure safety to all the residents keys within that lock box.
I had also worked on some form redesigns for users to edit their account, payment and home information more easily. Capturing credit cards with their cell phone will help users who have their hands full or do not have the time to type in all the payment information. That can be seen below in figure 7.
More deliverables that I had less responsibility over can be seen below:
Learnings: I learned how to collaborate with a team and offer my strengths appropriately. I also took the opportunity to learn from my teammates as well. We established a clear line of communication with each other and always were transparent with our tendencies and work habits to ensure no problems arose.
Moving forward: I would like to dive deeper into the user experience the Urban Leash Employees have and possibly apply some redesigns to make their job as fluid as possible.
