An app which offers a reliable, convenient and inexpensive way to take care of your pets when you can’t.
This app started as a group design project that I worked on with my classmates Zoe and Sonali. We discovered that 68% of all households in the United States own at lease one pet. We also found that most of these pet owners share the same problem: it is difficulty finding a suitable caretaker for their pets when they are busy or away. Pet hotels are often too expensive or uncomfortable, and pet sitters can be unprofessional and unreliable.
We want to create a new solution for per owners. So just like Airbnb, our app allow you to find comfortable and reliable accommodation for your pets.
We have found 6 people in our research: 4 dog owners and two cat owners. The dog owners are: 1) an IT consultant who just moved to the US last year and now lives in the Bay Area; 2) a Chinese graduated student in the Bay Area; 3) an accountant from NY but currently working in the Bay Area; 4) a marketing manager in the Bay Area. The two cat owners are: 1) an university instructor from LA, and 2) an education consultant from Seattle. In our interviews with this subject, we discovered multiple recurring terms including: pet-friendly; safe; reliable; comfortable; family; experienced; price; familiar with pet.
Perhaps the most important insight we gained is that pet owners believe their pets have their own unique behavior, character and personality. For this reason, they feel uncomfortable leaving their pets in the care of others. They adamantly want a pet sitter who is either very familiar with their pet or is a professional animal care giver.
Using our research, we designed the user flow and wireframe. After that, we found 9 people to do be the user testing base on the wireframe. We discovered that the users felt it was not convenient to switch UI between a pet sitter and a pet owner.
We redesigned the user flow again. This time, we decided to use a calendar for combining all of the bookings for pet owners and pet sitters. This means users can see all of their bookings on the calendar, no matter if they are a pet owner or sitter. This change enabled our users to use this app more smoothly and conveniently.
After we implemented the solution, we designed the interface for this app. We chose yellow and green as the main colors, to deliver a fresh, clean and natural appearance. Moreover, we used brown as a secondary color to express reliability and safety. We named it HappyPaw since we wanted pet owners to know that their dogs would enjoy a happy and comfortable boarding experience. Furthermore, we created its logo including the elements of dog, house and heart to deliver the same concept.
Our goal is to create an app which offers a reliable, convenient and inexpensive way to take care of your pets when you can’t. Using our research and testing, we came up with the features below to achieve our goal.
We had 5 users test our HappyPaw_version_1, and got the feedback below:
1. Logo is kind of complicated.
2. Brown color texts are more like clickable links than paragraphs.
3. Calendar is a good idea since it allows users to look at the bookings easily, but they also found it confusing to combine the bookings of pet owners and sitters, and their different statues.
4. Inbox is also confusing because it combines the notifications and messages.
Based on the above feedback, we redesigned the interface and adjusted the flow to improve the user experience.
Here are the User Journey Mapping and Prototype for more details.