Weekly Design Problem #3 — Adopt The One
Prompt #3
Millions of animals are currently in shelters and foster homes awaiting adoption. Design an experience that will help connect people looking for a new pet with the right companion for them. Help an adopter find a pet which matches their lifestyle, considering factors including breed, gender, age, temperament, and health status.
Provide a high-level flow and supporting wire frames.
Challenges
1. Sticking to the reality of how people best find their pets
The main issue with first using an app to find a pet is the lack of interaction they actually have with the pet, which is arguably the most important deciding factor. I was originally considering adding a camera feature that allows the user to talk to the pet through an audio device connected in the pet’s room or have the app connect to mechanical hands that do whatever the user wants in order to interact with the pet before actually meeting them in person. Essentially I decided against it because nothing beats real life interaction with a dog, which is why instead of those features, I simply added an “appointments” tab in order to schedule meet and greets with the pets. As much as I wanted to think outside of the box, there are hard facts that kept my ideas grounded and produced a better solution.
2. Restraining from tunnel visioning
When creating the solutions for this app, each page came naturally and when I finished, I nearly decided to start creating the prototype on Illustrator when I realized that sticking to the first and only design I thought of is a horrible idea. As a result, I had to exercise the creative design muscles a little more and produced several more versions that each had a piece in contributing to a much better final design. Lesson learned: don’t forget to take a step back
Logistics
Demographic: People trying to adopt a pet
User Goal: To find the best options of pets for them that they may potentially adopt
Research
Current Process
Because I did not have people to interview about adopting a pet and because there was a scarcity of helpful articles or websites about how people adopt pets, I looked towards YouTube to help me with this step of research. Watching “vlogs” (video logs) allowed me to see people document their experience and process of adopting a pet, making it a very helpful — albeit not perfect — replacement for user interviews. It’s always through discovering the current process where I find the user pain points and address them through user needs.
Competitive Analysis
Petfinder, Adopt-a-Pet, and Petango are three different pet finder websites. The most important commonality among them was the structure of how a pet and its info were shown, thus helping me structure this feature on my app. Their differences lied in the details of this structure, meaning the hierarchy of information about the pet was shown in different ways, which also helped me shape my app. With tons of information to tell about the pet, it was originally difficult to decide how to show that information and also which ones to show on the preview and which ones to leave hidden. This competitive analysis really helped alleviate those challenges.
User Needs
1. To narrow down the best pets out of dozens and dozens of options
2. To clearly see the abundant amount of information about the pets without being overwhelmed
3. To immediately have access to the most relevant pets according to the user’s preferences
Final Design Decisions
Application Matching
Right at the beginning of the app, the user fills out a form with their preferred type of pet. While filling out every single line is not required, it helps narrow down the scope of the type of animals they will match with, making their life easier when trying to narrow down on pets. This way, they do not have to search through every single pet’s profile to see which one they’ll be interested in.
Starring Parts of the Application
There are parts of the application that the user can star, marking them as important dealbreakers when looking for pets. Obviously the pets they match with will not have every single thing on their list, but if they star certain features, it will ensure that only pets with those features will appear. They will also be in red text when reading a pet’s full card information.
Automatic Scheduling vs. Manually Scheduling
When making appointments, users only have to select their most convenient date. The times are automatically done for them, scheduling the earliest time that all selected dogs can be played with back to back. Otherwise, they have the option to manually set up the time slots for each dog.
Reading Pet Information
Since users are already going through massive amounts of information, the last thing they need is blocks of text to read for each pet. As a result, everything is in short, concise text.
High-level Flow
I made this app with the idea that it belongs to a particular shelter. As a result here is the high-level flow of what an experience would look like:
Final App
Interact with the prototype ‘Adopt the One’ by clicking below!
