While thinking up a design challenge for myself is fun, my ideas are usually not too practical and tend to be a bit too broad. I was thinking about doing short design challenges with limited time in 4-5 days to define a minimum viable product. Also it's close to Agile management method for fast development and testing.
The challenge:
Millions of animals are currently in shelters and foster homes awaiting adoption. Design an experience that will connect people looking for a new pet with their ideal companion.
I approached this design assessment in these following steps, the project is constrained in the span of 4 days.
My Approach
I approached this design assessment in these following steps:
Context: Define challenge, Desired outcome, Assumptions, General context
Understanding Users: Persona, Job story, User journey
Ideation: Competitive review, Task Flow, Feature Ideation
Design: Wireframe, UI, Prototype
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1. Context
First, I will list everything provided by the challenge and some assumptions that need to be clarified.
Challenge:
Design an app to help people adopt their suitable pet from shelters and foster homes.
Outcome:
- Adopters can find their suitable pet.
- Adopters can contact shelters and foster homes easily.
- Adopters can easily fill information through the app.
Assumptions:
I will use the 5W’s+1H model to make some assumptions about the app. This is just my approach for now, I may experiment with a different method next time.
I will try to find out as much information about the business or situation as possible. In this project, these are some of my findings:
- Most pet shelters are funded and require some form of application to adopt a pet, some may kill animals if they’re too full.
- Foster homes, rescue groups are mostly voluntary work.
- If adopters aren’t a good fit for the pet, the pet is likely to be returned to the shelters.
- Sometimes there will be interviews and possibly a house check to confirm adopters’ information.
- Adopting dogs has more requirements than adopting cats or other animals.
2. Understanding users
I created some personas to assume potential users’ context, goals and pain points and put myself in the users’ perspectives.
Persona 1: Emma
Emma’s Jobstory:
When I am away from home during day, I’m afraid my cat Toby will be lonely. I want to find a cat friend for her in the shelters near I live so it’s convenient for me to visit and pick him/her up.
Emma’s User Journey:
Persona 2: Alan
Alan’s Jobstory:
When we moved to this new house with my family, we always wanted a dog to be a family member and a friend for my child Timmy. I want to find a dog in a shelter preferably within 40 miles around my house so I can pick him/her up by car.
Alan’s User Journey:
The research phase takes 2 days.
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3. Ideation
I also check out the available apps on the market, some are from reputable shelters or foster homes. Currently most of the apps only pay attention to filtering pets that users like, not pets suitable with users’ lifestyles.
Normally these app and service only connect users to the shelters about the pet they like, then the shelters have to do the screening and interviews later.
After the research phase, I can now define the flow of the app. I start by defining the golden path to nail down the core features to focus on.
Then I use this path as a base to create the most important task flows of the app.
From the User Journey and Task Flow, these are the features that I’d like to implement:
High priority features:
Low priority features:
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4. Design
There are a lot of questions to know more about users’ lifestyle. They can be grouped into:
Age, Health, Pet Experience, Reason to adopt, Accommodation, Financial, Family status
For the Users’ lifestyle survey I will only pick some questions as demo. I sketched a couple of options here:
I chose Option 4 as the main theme for the app. I initially wanted to allow users to manually input their location at this stage, but it can be adjusted in their Profile tab later.
Questions answered with Number slider must be converted to Checkbox (single choice) but I think this is still the most optimal option. Option 3 or 1 can be fallbacks.
Here are some options for the Home main screen:
It’s better to create higher fidelity prototype and test user flow and some usability at this point. For the sake of presentation I will jump to make some UI for the main screens. For this app some bright warm color should look engaging and optimistic.
This option might look a bit bland but I will only focus on the layout for the time being.
When users use filters, they are prompted to choose the type of pet they want to see first, more detailed filters is adjusted for different type of pet.
Most of pets’ profiles also varies in length. When select a profile, users can choose to Donate or Contact shelters for information.
The majority of shelters are not well connected with the app so I chose to use more stable contact information. Users can choose to fill a detailed application supported by the app and attach when they want to adopt
Users can favorite pets they like to view later
This covers the basic flow for user to search and adopt a pet suitable for their lifestyle. I include the interactive prototype in this link below:
I try to plan all the tasks of the project in 4 days but it does feel a bit rush. However I think it's a good experience to prioritize and plan your project in design sprints like this.
Thank you for reading.
