CONTEXT

The pet industry has been experiencing exponential growth for a while now, and with the current situation of the pandemic, many people are spending much more time at home that there has been a surge in demand for ‘pandemic pets’ as described by CTV news, as many are looking for companions to keep them company during self-isolation. Statista also shares some interesting facts reporting that there are now more-pet owning households than there are those with children which comes with an estimated total expenditure of $99.0 billion dollars for the pet industry in 2020, and that’s only counting for the U.S household market.

THE PROBLEM

This digital application along with the paired smart collar would allow users to know vital metrics about their pets for example step count, distance traveled, calories, heart rate, time active and sleep quality to name a few. The one feature we are looking to further explore in this challenge is getting the location of the pet in case they become lost and separated from their owner.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

With the great number of pets that become lost and don’t make it back to their owners, we want to design a digital experience that will help pet owners recover their pets when they become lost.

MIND MAP

With the great number of pets that become lost and don’t make it back to their owners, we want to design a digital experience that will help pet owners recover their pets when they become lost.

ASKING QUESTIONS

MAKING ASSUMPTIONS

1. The smart collar is already in existence and our task is to make the experience of the user with the digital device that connects with the collar as seamless as possible.

2. The product is a new release and we do not have any previous knowledge on user expectations. We are not improving upon an existing product.

3. Both the smart collar and the phone are connected to data and have full battery enabling the two systems to interact with one another at all times. (Although I’m making this assumption, it’s important to keep this in mind when designing products and systems which depend on one another. Having full connectivity at all times in a real-world scenario is not possible. Specially for users who do not have active data plans)

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Competitive analysis is crucial in understanding what is currently available in the market. It’s about understanding their strengths and weaknesses, their success and failures, what customers’ expectations of the products are, how to improve on the unique selling points and overall provides a benchmark against which you can measure your own growth.
The method I used here was to dive into the app store and find pre-existing apps that claimed to do pet tracking and also paired with a smart collar, followed by taking a look at the reviews left by some users. It’s critical to study both positive and negative reviews as these are strengths and weaknesses posed by products that have already been tested by real users. It can give us great insight as to the direction we could be taking.

USER RESEARCH

The next step was to get some participants in this age group and see how they felt about the idea of being able to track their pet. I posed some questions to understand how they felt about the idea of an app that could track their pet’s location.

PERSONA

This led me to build a persona based on the ideal user for this app to focus now on the user’s motivations, goals and challenges when working with the app. This will allow us to make a concrete rather than elastic concept of the user.

SOLUTION

Having some knowledge on what our user wants and expects from an app like this, and pairing it with the knowledge we did earlier in our research, I decided that the best option to go about solving our problem statement was to focus on two features.
(1) The first is health metrics and second the training aspect of the app. For the first point I understood that in order for the owner to be more aware of the pet’s habits and doings, they would need to know how the pet is feeling. As we learned, providing sufficient exercise and allowing the pet to be entertained throughout the day, is a way to combat boredom in pets therefore aiding and preventing the animal from finding other ways to keep busy and running away. The two methods work hand in hand where training and exercise support the need for some sort of health tracking data. These health metrics would be gathered from the smart collar.
(2) The second feature that I looked into was providing training as a way to prevent pets from running away. Although the map and GPS on the pet is a great solution for knowing where the pet is, we need to go further and solve the problem of pets who act upon their first instincts without having any behavioural or obedience training. By providing the location of the pet we are safe to know its whereabouts, by providing training for the pet, we are helping to stop the problem from happening in the first place.

JOURNEY MAP

Next step is to sketch a sample journey a user would take to go about finding their pet. It allows us to visualize what steps and process users go through in order to accomplish their goal, we also explore how the app would respond to user inputs.

TASK FLOW

The task flow helps to create a visual guide and paths that the user could take when using the specific function of the app. It allows us to see the interaction between users and the system and understand how they play out. In this task flow, the user begins by activating the app when they are about to go on the walk with the pet and so the app begins to collect health metrics. The user is then tasked to do one of two options at this point. (1) To finish the walk, at which point the app gives a summary of final metrics collected and offers various training for the pet, or (2) Report the pet as lost and the app offers a live map of the pet’s location until the pet is found. User is then prompted to end the walk or continue the walk at which the process begins again.

SITEMAP

Following what we determined the ideal journey map and task flow are for the scenario, next step is to take those key inputs and turn them into a visual hierarchy to understand the relationships between the different pages in the app.
We had discussed that our users wanted to know health data about their pets but not join it with the tracking map display. So these have been separated into two separate tabs. Earlier on in our research we also learned that one of the reasons pets may run away is because of lack of training, to solve this a tab was added to help users train their pets while at home.

WIREFRAMES

The wireframes are important in noting down key features required in the final prototype. The previous sitemap had given me a rough idea of how information was going to be organized on the page and what pages were necessary for the concept, I now began sketching to get a visual idea of these screens. Although I give some knowledge on what is included in each screen at this point, take a look further on at the Prototype stage to get a full rundown of each screen.

PROTYPE

You can view the final prototype here.

IN CLOSING

We have solved our problem statement of creating a digital experience which helps to find the pet when it becomes lost by giving accurate GPS location of the pet when it leaves the safe location assigned by the owner or when the pet is separated from the owner when they go on a walk. We also went above and beyond and solved for the root cause of why pets become lost which as research stated was due to insufficient entertainment, boredom and lastly lack of training.
‍
User research was conducted to understand how users feel about the currently existing apps in the market and we discovered some insights that led to our final design. Questions were posed to users who currently have pets to understand how they felt about an app that provided health information and GPS location for their pet and got great feedback which allowed me to create an ideal persona of our typical user type.

Along the way we also defined our users main goals, their desires, and how they would benefit from this application. I defined our three main experience principles which meant our experience had to be reliable , accommodating, and trustworthy in order to align our principles to the users interactions, and this was seen all across the prototype.

FURTHER THOUGHTS

Although I gave myself a week to work through this challenge, I would have wanted to conduct some user testing to understand fully how a real world user would go about working with this app. This would have given me information on pain points and what could have been improved for version two of the design, as well as challenges the users go through when working through the app.

Although I believe I got some great information from users by posting some questions, I also would have also wanted to spent more time gathering more information and asking further questions like how would one go about finding their pet prior to building the app, or asked for a situation when their pet came to get lost and how they felt during this situation in order to understand more difficulties users experience in these situations.

COMPLETE CASE STUDY

I wrote an in-depth article on Medium with lots more information about this case study. You can find it here.