Pawnder | Michael Parkin

Pawnder

A dating-style application that aims to simplify the adoption process for first-time, young adult, pet adopters

Role

UX Researcher & Lead UX Designer

Type

Team Coursework

Timeframe

August 2023 - December 2023

❓ Overview

🔍

The Scenario

Finding a pet is an extremely involved and time-consuming process, especially for young adult first-time pet adopters who are unfamiliar with the entire process. It involves numerous steps: from choosing your desired pet breed, learning about pet care, visiting shelters, aclimitzaing your pet... The list goes on.

⚠️

The Problem

How can we develop a solution that streamlines the pet adoption process, providing assistance to young, first-time, pet adopters?

💡

The Solution

First-time, young adult, pet adopters noted that although adoption agencies make use of technology, they are often poorly designed and not well implemented. As such, a dating-style application that utilizes familiar swiping gestures to select pets was designed - streamlining the pet selection process.

✅ Figma Prototype

View Figma Board

🗓️ Timeline

🕵🏼‍♂️ Discovering The Current Adoption Space

🕵🏼‍♂️

Discovering The Current Adoption Space

What Solutions Already Exist?

To start, an analysis was done of five common systems that exist for pet adoption - visiting/interacting with the service where possible.

1. Traditional Shelters

In-person shelter adoption involves potential adopters navigating through individual stalls to choose a pet, creating an environment for personal interaction and discovery. While this approach suits some, it can be overwhelming or discouraging for others because of the odors and loud noises.

2. Adoption Websites

Adoption websites play an important role in the adoption process, displaying adoptable pets to adopters, allowing them to view these pets from anywhere they wish. However, potential adopters still need to go to a shelter to actually adopt the pet.

3. Neighborhood Applications, 4. Social Media Channels, & 5. Word of Mouth

While more informal, these adoption methods are often done among individuals with pre-existing connections. This ultimately fosters a heightened sense of trust between adopters and those giving away the pet, promoting increased transparency in understanding the pet's behavior.

Who Are The Stakeholders?

Through our research, we identified two primary stakeholders and two secondary stakeholders.

Who Are The Target Users?

Based on initial research into the topic space, for this project the team chose to focus on young adult, first-time pet adopters who, being unfamiliar with pet adoption, stand to benefit the most from an innovative and novel adoption solution.

In addition, this group is often frustrated with existing adoption technologies and would greatly benefit from a more user-friendly, engaging platform designed to connect them seamlessly with the pets they desire.

🎯 Understanding The Users Adoption Experience

🎯

Understanding The Users Adoption Experience

Our User Research

Once our white paper research was complete, we moved on to our user research.

The Semi-Structured Interviews

Our semi-structured interviews aimed to gather more qualitative data and dive deeper into some reasons and behaviors with young-adult adopters. While our target user group was first-time adopters, we chose to interview participants with varying levels of adoption experience in order to understand how the adoption process has changed over time. All interviews were then conducted over Zoom, giving our participants and us the most flexibility.

The Data Synthesis

After all interviews were completed, we held an interpretation session and constructed an affinity map to consolidate and organize our data across multiple users and uncover important insights.

What Were the Findings?

Young adults are fairly tech literate and felt let down by existing digital pet adoption solutions

First-time pet adopters have little, to no, experience with pet care

The primary motiviation for wanting a pet was either companionship or emotional support

Adopters had preset preferences for the type of pet they wanted, leading to unrealistic expectations for that pets role in their life

Most first-time adopters felt overwhlemed by the pet selection process and didn't know how to start

Our Hierarchical Task Analysis

Based on the main findings from our interviews, we created two hierarchical task analyses. This first task analysis represents how our target users currently select a pet to adopt, and the second task analysis represents how our target users currently go about finalizing the adoption process.

The Design Requirements

As a result of our requirements-gathering activities, we defined six high-level design requirements to advise our future design decisions:

Our design should not assume prior knowledge of pet adoption
Our design should reflect how young adults interact with technology
Our design should accommodate users with sensory issues
Our design should be affordable for adopters and shelters
Our design should have clear and accurate information about adoptable pets
Our design should include a variety of pet species, rather than just a few.

As a result of our requirements-gathering activities, we defined six high-level design requirements to advise our future design decisions:

Our design should not assume prior knowledge of pet adoption
Our design should reflect how young adults interact with technology
Our design should accommodate users with sensory issues
Our design should be affordable for adopters and shelters
Our design should have clear and accurate information about adoptable pets
Our design should include a variety of pet species, rather than just a few.

🛠️ Designing & Prototyping a Solution

🛠️

Designing & Prototyping a Solution

What Ideas Did We Brainstorm?

After gathering and defining our requirements, we then engaged in “informed brainstorming” to explore the design space for our problem and develop design alternatives. To do this we went through a round of metaphorical thinking and crazy 8's. This ultimately resulted in a handful of different ideas and mockups, some of which can be seen below:

From all of this, we then ultimately chose Pawnder as our final idea and started to create our design prototype.

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

Using Figma, we started by developing a series of low-fidelity wireframes for the application.

Our Design Language

Thereafter, we created a design language for the applications high-fidelity wireframes - ensuring it was playful and matched the intended aesthetic of Pawnder.

High-Fidelity Wireframes

Finally, we then used the low-fidelity wireframes, along with various feedback sessions to develop a set of high-fidelity wireframes and prototype (seen in the project overview). As the lead UX designer for the project, most of the high-fidelity wireframes were designed and created by me.

✅ Evaluating Pawnder

✅

Evaluating Pawnder

Our Evaluation

Due to the time constraints of this project, we conducted a discount evaluation of our prototype with other students in the MS-HCI program. We developed a plan to support two evaluation goals, linking directly to two of our most crucial design requirements:

Our design should not assume prior knowledge of pet adoption
Our design should reflect how young adults interact with technology

Our design should not assume prior knowledge of pet adoption
Our design should reflect how young adults interact with technology

How Did We Run The Evaluation?

To provide a comprehensive evaluation of our system while still working within our time constraints, we elected to perform a combination of surveys and usability tests for Pawnder. These were perfromed as follows:

Our Results

While preliminary, overall we saw a…

31%

…improvement in completion time and satisfaction

🤔 Reflecting on the Process

🤔

Reflecting on the Process

My Thoughts On The Project

This project marked my first experience with Figma and a comprehensive journey through the UX design process. As such, it provided invaluable insights into the intricacies of user-centered design.

I learned the importance of prioritizing core features to maintain clarity, embracing iterative design through user feedback, and effectively communicating design decisions with team members and potential users.

This project not only enhanced my proficiency in Figma but also reinforced the significance of empathy, adaptability, and clarity in creating user-centric solutions.

With Love From

Atlanta, Georgia