A couple weeks before coming up with the idea for this app, a friend of mine found a lost dog on her way to work who didn't have a collar or any other information that pointed to the owner. We started knocking on doors, hanging up signs, and posting on social media. After a few days of no luck, she ended up taking the dog to a no kill shelter.
Millions of pets are lost or stolen in the US every year. People need a way to find lost pets for pet owners/find the owners of lost pets because looking through neighborhoods and posting on social medias are ineffective.
In order for us to understand our user's needs, wants, habits, and painpoints associated with losing/finding a pet, we created a 7 question questionnaire that had 25 total respondents. We believe that by creating an app to find lost pets for pet owners/find the owners of lost pets, we will achieve less strays on the street and a better community. We will know this to be true when we see 30% of our users report that they found their lost pet with help from our app.
Based on findings from my research, I developed user personas for those who have lost a pet and for those who find lost animals. With the two user personas, I tried to empathize with my user base in order to build a user story map.
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As we gained more understanding on how our users act and feel, we’ve started to lay out some user stories to come up with features based on what would solve their issues.
A typical user story would be a problem that the user experiences:
To further our research and see if our app was necessary or would help in any way, we did a competitive analysis. By doing this, we are able to see which apps have similar goals.
While gaining insight and an understanding of our two personas, we were able to determine what specific needs should come from the app. We wanted to create a minimal and easy to use accessible design to make sure we are inclusive to all users.
Using the prior sketches, we started to come up with wireframes that would be the guideline to the functionality and visual style of our app. It includes information like what elements will be on each screen, how it's displayed, what information is most important and what call to actions are taken when the user makes a selection.
The style guide's visual identity is centered around the warm colors of red and beige in relation to alerts and a sense of home. The colors scheme creates a harmonious and simple experience.
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After completing the first draft of the high-fidelity wireframes, we did a first round of usability testing. We recieved a lot of great feedback and went back and make those adjustments. Our last step was to do a second round of usability testing to see if we missed anything.
Using the UI style guide and usability testing results, I started creating high-fidelity mockups. The overall user interface design was kept minimal to ensure users don’t get overwhelmed using the application.
This project was a fun and fast paced process. In the beginning, we had a long list of potential ideas and features that we wanted to implement. However, as we went through our research and reviewed our data, we realized we didn't need to have so many features because it might overwhelm the user. Once we got to designing, we started to simplify the app to make it easy to use.
Our next steps would be to prepare the app for the development phase, expand to other areas in Souther California, and eventually other states.
