MexiPup

Link to the final prototype:

I decided to follow the methodology of Human Center Design to approach this art design challenge. The five steps in the HCD process include empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. 

How I do it?

I decided to follow the methodology of Human Center Design to approach this art design challenge. The five steps in the HCD process include empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The first step in this process is the empathize phase, where I seek to understand my end-users and their perspectives, feelings, and behaviors, in this case, my app will be used for two final users: 1) non-profit associations, and 2) dog lovers or people that just want to help dogs. For understanding my end users, I did informal interviews with family, friends, and people that I know that love dogs and have adopted or rescue dogs with associations, or that they have rescued dogs by themselves from the streets. Also, I interview them informally about why and how they make donations, and how other ways of help they think it should exist, what tools they used to communicate, etc. Furthermore, I start following Mexican non-profit associations on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and I observe through months how they operate, how they communicate with their followers for asking money, help, assistance for rescue or to pay a bill for the veterinary, etc. Moreover, I investigate the association's websites, read about Mexican stray dogs news or reports, and search for relative information about the topic.

The second step in the HCDE methodology is the define phase, which is where I analyze all the information that I got from the research about associations, observations, and informal interviews, by bringing meaning and understanding to it. I create a physical affinity diagram and analyze all the information, this step was very helpful to prioritize and categorize my discoveries.

The third step is ideate, here my goal was to come up with many ideas as possible based on what I learned, and try to answer these questions: what are the main problems users are having? How can I make their experience better? I did brainstorming and I stay focused on the needs and desires of my end-users. I write down my ideas and start ordering them through the categories of the problems that I defined in the previous phase. This step was helpful to create the architecture information for the app and divided it into six main functions or categories: 1)adopt, 2) donate, 3)report, 4)rescue, 5)emergencies and 6)contact associations.

The fourth step is the prototyping phase, where I try to turn my end user’s needs into design solutions, so I took the six categories and I started creating sketches of how the app will have to look, how my users will be able to visualize information, the icons, the complete design or style of the app, guidelines, etc. Once I defined the complete architecture information, guidelines, design principles, I built a prototype using Adobe XD, to bring my ideas to life. I aim to solve many of the problems that I uncovered in the previous steps.

Finally, to ensure my prototype is congruent with user needs, I perform usability testings with six participants, where I asked them to interact with my prototype as they normally do when they just download a new app, and that after playing and interacting with it, provide me feedback, and answer some questions about the design, functionality, navigation, wording, architecture information, etc. From this step, I gain valuable feedback from my users, on which aspects I should modify or which sections should I add more information, for improving my app. After analyzing the discoveries of the usability testing, I prioritize the main problems and iterate and redesigned my app. One of the most important modifications was that users need a profile to see their activities because they wanted to be able to grade other users about their work, and also to see how much they have done for help dogs, so I decided to include this in my app.