Design thinking for pet adoption and product development
During the pandemic and its associated stay-at-home time, many folks picked up new activities such as bread-making or jigsaw puzzles. My household went in a slightly different direction: We started fostering dogs for local rescue organizations. A challenging hobby for sure, but I’ve learned a ton about what goes into a successful adoption and (surprisingly) about design thinking.
Our first foster was Harper, a 1-year-old German shepherd mix found as a stray in rural Eastern Washington. She was in rough shape when we met her, emaciated from life in the wild, and medicated from surgery to remove a bad kidney. Her first 2 weeks with us were a haze of wound care, pill pockets, and veterinarian visits, so not much was “known” about Harper’s personality.
One key trait the foster organization was clear about: Harper was not friendly with other dogs. Before Harper was medicated, she barked and lunged at any dog she saw.
When “marketing” a dog for adoption, any less-desirable personality trait presents a significant challenge. If a dog isn’t friendly toward other dogs, this limits the pool of potential adopters to households without dogs. So with our goal of giving Harper a better chance at adoption, we set out to solve this barking problem, or at least understand the limits of Harper’s dog tolerance.
Once Harper healed, we took her to supervised meetups on leashed walks, in parks, and in fenced yards with dogs we knew would be friendly. At each of these meetups, Harper did indeed bark like mad when she saw a new dog. But a fascinating pattern began to appear: After an initial greeting and 5 minutes together, Harper always settled down. The barking would stop. She would even play with the other dog!
Harper wasn’t barking because she was unfriendly to other dogs. She was barking because she was *excited* to meet other dogs.
The happy epilogue: Armed with this new data, Harper’s adoption profile was changed, and she found an amazing new home… with another dog.
— — —
No matter what species you’re designing for, you need to understand the “why,” if you want to understand the behavior. This is design thinking at its most pure. And it’s applicable not just to dog adoption but product development as well.
If your design goal is a useful or delightful experience, you can’t simply look at one engagement metric, like frequency or time spent on an app. You must understand the “why” behind that metric. And to understand that, you must conduct research that captures a fuller context of use.
A hypothetical example: Let’s imagine your team has existing data which shows a large percentage of users engaging with a core feature far less than expected. It would be easy to assume that people don’t use that feature often because they don’t like it or it’s not useful. (In other words: It’s easy to assume that the dog is barking because it is unfriendly.) One might assume this less-used feature could be removed from future versions of the app.
But once you look beyond this data point and explore the context for this behavior (via interviews, contextual inquiries, or even other quantitative sources), you might uncover new data that completely disproves your hypothesis. You might discover that folks are using this feature once per week for a very specific but very important purpose, and they’re actually quite pleased with the experience. You might find behavior that isn’t tracked by your data, such as visual searching or browsing.
So, although a usage profile might look bad if you rely on metrics like frequency or engagement (the dog is barking), in reality the app experience is useful and delightful (the dog is excited to meet other dogs).
— — —
For designers and researchers, design thinking isn’t just about collecting behavioral data. It’s about understanding the goals for your product. And once established, it’s about collecting the right data, at the right time, in the right context, with the right outcomes to align toward those goals.
And of course, whether your goal is a useful app feature or a happy home for a stray dog, always be mindful of assumptions affecting your hypotheses. It’s important to understand not only which dogs are barking, but why they’re barking in the first place.
— — —
If you would like to donate to a local animal rescue organization or humane society, here are a few suggestions:
