Alejandra Peñas
PawPrint: Where Technology Meets Tail-Wagging Care
Role: User Experience Researcher and Designer; User Interface Designer
Duration: June 26, 2023 - July 20, 2023
Tools:
Overview
The Problem
How might we aid pet owners to maintain the health and wellness of their pets through organized record keeping, optimized food recommendations, and access to emergency vet services?
Proposed Solution
Ditch the paper pile, conquer pet care chaos. Upload medical records, schedule meds & meals, and find emergency vets - all in one tap. Leave your furry friend with sitters, confident they have every detail at their fingertips. No more frantic searches, just stress-free peace of mind.
Research
We believe that making more efficient tools for pet owners to find quality local veterinarians and pet care is a necessity. Our service will facilitate an organized way to document information while also helping users successfully find quality medical providers and affordable essentials for their furry friends.
From city lofts to sprawling pastures, we embarked on a mission to sniff out the needs of pet parents. Our diverse interview squad, united by their love for all things furry and feathered, helped us navigate the messy terrain of pet care challenges. Would PawPrint's features become their trusted leash, or just another tangled toy in the crate?
Beyond shared interests, the interviews unveiled a key divergence from our initial assumptions. Pet owners expressed far less interest in a vet finder than we anticipated. Instead, their anxieties around unexpected situations highlighted a deeper need for comprehensive emergency information readily accessible within PawPrint. This shift in priority informs our development, pushing us to prioritize features that address their core concerns about their pets' well-being.
Our interviews revealed a heartwarming truth: for these pet owners, their furry friends aren't just companions, they're family. The love and responsibility run deep, driving an unwavering commitment to their pet's health and happiness.
Our PawPrint journey took a fascinating detour! We assumed pet owners craved document access while traveling, but interviews painted a different picture. Many travel, yes, but their furry friends often prefer home comforts, thanks to travel anxieties or budget constraints. This pivotal learning led us to refocus PawPrint on empowering seamless information sharing with trusted sitters, ensuring complete care even when miles apart.
Introducing Eric Sanchez, our user persona! We learned pet owners like him prioritize having an emergency plan for their furry friends, not travel features. This opens up exciting possibilities for PawPrint to address their most pressing needs!
This Orlando-based Professor loves spending time with his cat Cheeto and dog Lola. He’s focused on his pets comfort and health. Eric’s needs and expectations are for an app that is centered on pet documentation, emergency info plus health and wellness. He’s also overall a pretty cool guy.
We analyzed and compared nine competitors, but none truly solved all of Eric's needs. Some focus on emergency vets, others on pet supplies, but none combine everything he wants. This is a big opportunity for PawPrint to offer something no other app does!
I wish there was more organization and storage digitally for pet owners.
You could earn points in exchange for pet supplies by engaging and using the application
What if there was a community space for owners to share tips and tricks?
Empowering peace of mind for pet parents! PawPrint packs three paw-some features: instantly accessible pet documents, a personalized emergency plan with vet contacts, and a health tracker for happy tails and wagging wellness.
Ideation and Sketching
Now that we established these three features, we wanted to create a realistic User Journey for Eric to take with our app. Here you can see an example of the journey he will take to set up his account before he leaves for vacation. Overall, once done, he will feel happy and confident handing Cheeto off with his pet sitter.
User Journey
Mind Mapping and Wireframes
From mind map branches to wireframe blooms, PawPrint's features blossomed! We meticulously planned each element, ensuring a smooth and intuitive user journey.
User Flow and Path
Starting at the splash screen, Eric logs in and from his home page, he selects Cheeto's profile.
Eric adds a new food routine for Cheeto.
To ensure the user was aware of when a task was completed, we included “success” screen.
Similarly, here Eric will be adding a medication schedule for Cheeto.
We kept the look for the input of information similar to keep consistency and avoid user confusion.
We decided to use overlay screens for Emergency Contacts and sharing of pet profiles.
Our shopping page was constructed to reflect competitors like Buddies, and users can navigate based off what type of pet they have. We also found showing previous purchases was a great feature to include for expediency.
With a purchase successfully completed, Eric navigates back to his home page and sees all of Cheeto’s updated information reflected.
Prototyping and Testing
We invited a total of seven people to explore PawPrint's user-friendliness! Building charming pet profiles and discovering delightful treats in our shop – all with intuitive guidance, not a search bar in sight. This helps us craft a PawPrint experience that's as warm and cuddly as your furry friend, packed with helpful info from nose to tail.
Out of those people, 5 out of 7 were successful navigating the prototype, resulting in an 87% success rate. Comments were overwhelmingly positive. We noticed some hesitations with users committing to certain actions and identified several areas of opportunity to improve.
"Yes, I struggled to figure out how to add the medication to the profile. It kept taking me to the pet profile and when I clicked the "medication" button it would send me to a page that the medication section didn't let me do anything."
Female - Age 21
"It was pretty simple. I did get a little lost trying to find the button to buy food and had to re-input all of the information to get to the page with the 'buy food' button. But I could have used the "shop" button at the bottom.
Male - Age 28
"When I was adding the food, the screen kept moving back to the top and it made it a little annoying to input the information and have to constantly move it back down.
Female - Age 36
New Iterations Post-Testing
Added a label to the back button, so user would have a clear understanding that this was a path they could take to return to the pet profile.
Added a continue shopping button on the My Cart page
Updated the Product Page to have checkboxes for Auto-Renewal options, allowing for weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly.
Our updated prototype shows Eric’s journey setting up Cheeto’s page before leaving them with a pet sitter, factoring in all these revisions.
Project Summary
Key Takeaways
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Our initial hypothesis of making more efficient tools for pet owners to find quality local veterinarians and pet care changed after we conducted our research.
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While we still concluded it was necessary to equip pet owners with better tools but changed our focus towards pet documents, emergency information and resources, and health and wellness to better fit the needs of our target audience.
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Our team invested was asked to create a shopping experience by the client and this led to the documentation features to not be thoroughly completed.
Next Iterations
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Although the client requested a mid-fi prototype, we would love to help in developing a branding kit and style guide for a hi-fi prototype.
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The documentation feature needs to be further researched with competitors that focus on digital filing systems such as OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox.
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Improve the design by having more uniform icons and labels for better user understanding and experience.