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UX Research for Pet Entertainment App
Team: Ally Kim, Kevin Tsai, Nasreen Obeid, Brian Thai, Kyla Goff-Tutson, Crystal Pham
PROJECT OVERVIEW
This project was completed for the Design at UCI club’s Project Teams program, where designers are asked to present mockups and a high-fidelity prototype of an app in 8 weeks, according to a set theme. The theme for this sprint was Entertainment, so our team of six collaborated on an app related to Pet Entertainment.
While we all worked together on each part of the project, my role was largely concerning the UX research side of the app (coming up with research questions, figuring out how to go about conducting research, and working with the team to synthesize insights off research)
PROBLEM
How can pet owners and their pets find new entertaining activities to do together?
SOLUTION
Pawfect allows pet owners to plan the “pawfect” day with their pet by finding personalized pet-friendly locations and events to go to together.
Questionnaire
Personalize recommendations to users
Map
Easily see local spots nearby
Reviews
See what others have to say
Process 🛠
EMPATHIZE-UNDERSTANDING THE USER
To discover how pet owners spend time with their pets outside of the home, we crafted a Google Forms survey asking pet owners about the type of pets they own, what kinds of activities they do with them and how often, the motivations behind those activities, and pain points they experience when trying to spend time with their pets.
We distributed this survey to pet owners using discord, social media, and word of mouth and got about 11 respondents. From the survey data, we extrapolated the following themes:
1. People have primarily cats & dogs.
2. Most ppl (75%) haven’t attended an organized pet event.
3. This is because they can’t find any, are not sure how their pets will behave, or are simply uninterested.
4. Low cost is extremely important to ppl when considering events.
5.For most people, a “pawfect" day with their pets means spending time with them at home or doing informal activities with them (park, beach) rather than formal organized events.
DEFINE - SETTING A DIRECTION
From our survey insights, we realized our app should focus on locations where users could spend time with their pets more casually rather than solely on formal pet event (which is what we had orginally planned to do). Therefore, we moved forward with the following goal:
Our mobile app will let users find pet-friendly locations/activities around them which will affect pets and their owners by allowing them to spend more time together outside of the home.
IDEATE AND DESIGNING - BRAINSTORMING AND DEFINING THE APP
With our goal in mind, we first created a user flow.
We decided to start the app with a questionnaire users could complete, so the locations and events shown would consider both the type and personality of the pet as well as the owners’ preferences for activities.
This was based on the research finding that pets varied in ability to interact with other animals, so some locations/events worked better for some animals than others.
Then, users would be able to see personalized locations and events to experience with their pet, and more detailed information about those recommendations.
We also added the ability for users to filter the locations and events they were recommeded according to factors users indicated were important to them when deciding where to go with their pets, such as low cost.
From the user flow, we drafted low-fidelity wireframes, largely building off the wireframes a team member, Crystal created.
TESTING - CONDUCTING USABILITY TESTS AND ITERATING
We then prototyped the low-fidelity wireframes and conducted usability testing with six people to evaluate the pain points on the user flow.
We each moderated a test, so to leverage consistency across the responses, we drafted a set of questions to ask in each test and rated each participant’s task completion from a scale of 1-5 (hard to easy).
We found that finding the home screen, filter button, and location/event information was easy for users. However, users found the filters were vague and could be more specific. For example, users were confused about what was meant by the filter “ratings.”
Based on this insight, the filter menu was designed to be more clear through the addition of specific parameters to each filter (ex: highest, lowest, largest, smallest). The filter "safety" was also removed because of its vagueness.
Other iterations we made were splitting up locations and events on the home screen to allow for easier differentiation between types of activities users could do with their pets.
Because events weren't something users particularly gravitated toward, the featured events section was also removed.
FINAL PRODUCT
Here is the final design we created after usability testing, with our team lead, Kevin, taking the lead on UI design.
Check out the final prototype here!
Conclusion 🏁
LESSONS
I'm very proud of what my team was able to accomplish in the time we had! However, there are a few things I would do differently if my team were to approach this project again:
1. Define clear deadlines for deliverables. By declaring specific due dates for action items, we could spend more time in meetings giving feedback on each other's work rather than just building, and work would be a reflection of all of our contributions rather than a single member's.
2. Establish a voting system to make decisions when our team was stuck between certain designs. This way, decisions can be made faster than us deliberating without knowing what to do.
I am grateful for the lessons learnt, new friends made, and experience gained from working on this project. Thank you reading this case study!
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