The Problem

Many people want to find a pet through a pet shelter or adoption agency, however; there are frustrations that come with this process. Many of the websites for pet shelters are not well-kept and it is hard to browse the animals without planning a visit to the shelter.

The Solution

Pawsibil is an application for people wishing to adopt a pet, as well as a platform for shelter management to market the pets they have for adoption. The app allows pet adopters to see a variety of different pet profiles from different shelters in one platform.

The goal of the platform is to remove stressors of the pet adoption process and to streamline the process by allowing the users to interact and find possible pets prior to visiting the animal shelter.

My Role

User research, user inverviews, persona creation, contextual inquiry, information architecture, wireframes, user testing

Tools

Axure, Adobe Photoshop

Discovery

Contextual Inquiry

Our group began our discovery process by completing a contextual inquiry where we interviewed and observed people browsing in animal shelters. From the observations and insights, we were able to draw insight clusters which helped us narrow our focus and requirements. A few of the insight clusters we drew from the contextual inquiry process were:

• Looks like there might be two main type of adopters, online researchers and walk-in shoppers. Our app might mostly appeal to the first type, but since most shelter applications ask for the same information, maybe we can sell it as a way to streamline the process of applying once they find the right match.

• Although online resources are used during the adoption process, people ultimately want to interact with the animal prior to the adoption.

• Technology is an important and prevalent part of the pet adoption process  

Personas

Based on the research conducted above, we created two distinct users, Sonya and Katie. Designing keeping these two personas in mind helped our group make informed design decisions.  

Information Architecture

After we felt we had a good feel for the types of users and requirements we needed to include, we outlined the content using a navigation map. As you can see, there are two distinct ways the content could flow, one way is designed for Sonya and the other for Katie.

Wireframes

When we tested our prototype with users, we were able to draw conclusions about which features the users liked and which were confusing or caused friction. We gave users the following key tasks:

1.       Log into the application as an “adopter”

2.       Log in as a “Shelter Owner”

3.       Create a Pawsibil account

4.       View and favorite a pet profile

5.       Search for a dog near you

Through these task scenarios, we discovered some things that the users liked and did not like about the application:

•       Pictures on the home screen were popular

•       People were easily able to login and find their saved search

•       The favorite function had mixed results, but was a familiar icon and functionality

•       Users wanted info they entered to be saved in the app

•       Have a home link on each page.

•       Make the form pages for adopters and professionals as uniform as possible by limiting free text fields and using buttons, check boxes and drop menus instead.

•       Allow multiple selections within the drop menus.

These conclusions lead us to make changes to our prototype. Some changes based off user requests were:

•       Tapping the “Pawsibl” on top now redirects to the Home page

•       Tapping the “favorites paw” on the top left redirects to favorites page.

•       When logged in, favorite stamps on home page and dog profile pages are now toggle-able

•       Search filters can now search for multiple values (eg. small or medium dog instead of only one)

•       Registration and login pages now have clickable fields to fill in info

•       Mail page added

Below are some screens from our low-fidelity prototype: