App Design
Concept Development
Art direction
UX/UI
Dogs demand a lot of their owners' time. It all comes with being a dog owner. Sometimes life gets in the way and owners can’t commit to their regular walking routines and they need an extra helping hand.
I conducted interviews and online research to develop an understanding of how owners would like to interact with their dogs, and what shortcomings they have. It was important to hear their opinions on the current market and options available.
A key insight was that owners felt that there was a lack of options that they could turn to, and generally relied on word-of-mouth referrals.
The solution was to create a mobile app that would be used as a quick and easy service for getting your dog walked when you need it most. Owners would be able to have user profiles where owners and walkers could leave their ratings and reviews, as well as photos.
It needed to:
1. Book walkers at short notice,
2. Create regular ongoing bookings.
3. Search nearby walkers that can travel to your house
4. To be cashless - Payment over the app instantly
I created two personas to help guide our design decisions by keeping the needs of our target audience in mind. Designing for these different users and their respective scenarios helped us make sure that our app would be useful for a wide audience while still meeting our target audience's specific needs.
We began our research by looking at current dog walking apps, and comparing the services they offer. We found that each app didn’t have a seamless booking process and the process felt clunky.
They were also lacking some key features we wanted to showcase such as user profiles & the ability to book instantly.
With this in mind, we conducted a survey to gauge our audience’s walking habits and how they use existing apps to plan their walks.
With the results of the research in mind, the flow of the app would need to focus on the ease of booking a dog walker first before focusing on the rest of the app.
Users would log onto the app, then search for their location. A list of dog walkers would appear and users would select one, read a bit about them, then click “book now”, resulting in either a successful booking or a failed attempt.
The other states were also mapped out in this process.
The initial sketches were created with a variety of different layouts in mind. We wanted to provide users with the easiest and quickest journey to booking their walk.
Figuring out how to display the user data on their page would turn out to be the most important as owners wanted to be able to see ratings, reviews, bookings & messages easily.
With the sketches finalised and a general idea in hand, I started the wireframes on Figma.
Various stages of user testing were conducted throughout the development of the app.
After each stage, face to face interviews were conducted to get feedback about content, layout, interactions & flow.
I asked participants to use the flow of the app to: Find a walker, message them & book them for a walk.
After the initial set of interviews I synthesised the results using affinity mapping and gathered the greater themes of time, efficiency & accessibility.
The app received positive feedback from participants but I had noticed a strong need for improvement with accessibility in mind. The shades of green were hard to decipher with the white letters and the text sizing was too small throughout the app.
I made all text on green backgrounds black instead of white, and changed green backgrounds to a light grey if they had a lot of text.
After those iterations were made I progressed into creating the HIFI prototype. Light greys were introduced as backgrounds and all buttons & forms were made into an accessible size.
Another round of usability testing was conducted with the same participants. The following key insights were about the flow of information:
1. Where would owners see their bookings?
2. What does the Dog walker see when using the app?
3. The 2 step booking process is too long and boring!
With this information, there was a nice direction to end the MVP.
I would go ahead and make changes by redesigning the signup page, as well as the walker profile page.
The payment pages were combined into the same page to allow for quicker and easier booking.
There were also new pages being introduced such as the "Dog owner profile", "Your bookings" page and a blog for up to date news and events.
Paws was created for a university project and I don't have any plans to pursue it further. Unless you’re a developer - then hit me up!
You can try the Working Prototype
HERE