BANSARI SHAH
Pet Warmth
Design Challenge
Millions of animals are currently in shelters and foster homes awaiting adoption. People are also looking for a new pet but they are having trouble finding a pet that matches their lifestyle which becomes a reason for less pet adoption.
Team
Bansari, Shreya, Jing
My Role
User research, UX/UI Design, Wireframing & Prototype
Duration
4 months
Research Question
How might we encourage people for Pet Adoption by helping them finding a pet according to their lifestyle?
User Profile
Who: Our target audience will be the people who want to adopt pets but they are hesitant to adopt one or the people who have not adopted pets before. The people who are interested in pet adoption but they don't know how to proceed for it.
What: Pet warmth is a website that encourages people to adopt pets from shelters and help them to find their suitable pets according to their lifestyle.
When: Anytime can be accessed with the internet on any smart devices using search criteria such as pet adoption websites, pets, adoptions, shelter homes or pet organizations.
Where: This website is online. It can be visited by smart devices with the internet required. It can be found in the list of pet adoption sites, blogs or local newsletters.
Why: The audience is curious about the requirements or costs for the pet adoption according to their routine and lifestyle. The audience might not have enough knowledge about pets or shelter homes.
Design Criteria
The main design principles that we wanted to focus are making it meaningful, informative and appealing.
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Make it meaningful: Design a website that uses natural colors to tell the story of what we are trying to communicate to users which are specifically related to pets. Pets are living beings and the audience should feel sensitivity, care, and affection towards pets while going through the website.
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Creating appeal: Create an appeal through design where images, text, and features are placed next to corresponding information. The audience should feel encouraged and excited to see the details of the pets and pet adoption.
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Make it informative: Inform the audience about necessary details for pets and pet adoption. Not only pre-adoption details but also provide information about the post pet adoption to continue their usage of the website after adoption.
Success Metrics
Increase:
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Traffic: The focus is to increase the number of people that visit the website and get knowledge about pet adoption. Not only visit the website but also get encouraged to adopt a pet from shelters.
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Consistent Usage: The users stick to the website even after adopting the pet as the website will provide support for pets and users will not have to find other sources to get help after the adoption.
Deliverables
Objective: To encourage people to adopt pets from the shelters using the website.
KPI: Pet adoption Growth KPI.
Definition of the KPI:
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The desired outcome: To encourage users to visit the website and adopt pets
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Motivating the users to adopt pets will help shelters to manage pets who are looking for a home.
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Progress will be measured as an increase in the number of pet adoptions from the shelter home.
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By providing the engaging content with pictures, the outcome will be influenced.
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A shelter home person is responsible for this metric
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Pet adoption will be increased by 20%
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Progress Will be reviewed on a monthly basis
UX Deliverables
Research
According to the American Pet Products Association 2015-2016 (APPA), approximately 6.5 million companion animals enter U.S. animal shelters nationwide every year.
Each year, approximately 1.5 million shelter animals are euthanized. Only 44% of all households in the United States have a dog, and 35% have a cat. Pet problems were defined as problematic behaviors, aggressive behaviors, grew larger than expected, or health problems owners could not handle.
People have few misconceptions about pet adoptions. Sometimes they don't know what they actually want. Even if they know what they want they don't know how to proceed. Many options are available nowadays but if these options don't fulfill people's choice then they don't know whom to ask. There is always a problem in getting free pets over fees for the adoption. There is a belief that shelter homes don't make good pets but that is not true.
As most of the time, the pets are relinquished to the shelter homes or foster homes because of moving to another place, allergies, lack of cost of pet maintenance or time, personal problems, illness and many more. So, we have tried to make a simple solution which can help people find their soul pets according to their lifestyle and that can eventually help shelter homes to manage pets.
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Process
Discover
Define
Design
Implement
Discover
User Interviews
We interviewed one of the managers of a Hayward Animal Shelter.
I took interviews with a person who recently adopted a rescue cat and also with a person who got a pet from a pet store. My other teammates took interviews with people who have adopted pets for a long time.
We also asked in interviews about why people choose to or not to adopt from an animal shelter, what are the pro and cons do they have.
Define
We created Personas, Empathy maps, User Journey maps to summarize the pain points of pet adoption. I was responsible to make the persona and Empathy map of a person who has recently adopted a rescue cat.
Personas
Personas
Empathy Map
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(Empathy map for the user who has adopted rescued cat)
User Journey Map
(User Journey map for the user who has adopted a cat recently)
Problem Findings
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Applications are too long and wordy for adoption
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There are no follow-ups of adopted animals
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People want to adopt but can’t adopt because of their lifestyle
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After finding the pain points we set our goals to achieve. To decide the goals we went through the whole process of brainstorming.
Goals
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Provide a better solution to choose the pet according to the different constraints of the pet and the adopter.
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Include features to encourage people to adopt pets.
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Create a feature which can help those who can not adopt pets but help the pets.
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Provide support to pet owners to find their lost pets.
We have categorized our goals in four different directions. The main focus is to provide a better solution to find the perfect match according to different constraints and encourage people to adopt pets in unique ways. We have also tried to create a feature that can allow people to help even if they don’t adopt pets. We have also included one additional feature of helping owners to find their lost pets on our website.
Design
We wanted to keep the name of the website which can give the feeling of a companion or a partner. So we came up with the name of Pet Warmth. We collaboratively decided the color scheme, layout design of the website.
We wanted to use the colors of animals on our website to give it a natural look.
Colour scheme:
Our focus was not only dogs or cats but also other animals so we included different paws of different animals in our logo.
I was responsible to create our own graphics in the prototype to indicate the different types of donations such as food, toys, vaccine, medicines, blankets, transport and bowls.
Paper Wireframes
We created the paper wireframes first and converted into low-fidelity wireframes.
( paper wireframes )
Low-fidelityWireframes
( low-fidelity wireframes )
Hight-fidelity Prototype
At last, we created a high-fidelity prototype with images, graphics, and colors.
To achieve the goal of providing a better solution to help adopters find their pets with different constraints, we made an application process simpler with pictures.
Each question required to be answered to find the pet so we have put the related image of that question on the top to make people aware of what they are going to answer.
To achieve the goal of encouraging people for adoption, I designed a homepage with different features. The first feature was to redirect users to find the right pet for them using " Find a companion" button as a pet is going to be an awesome companion in their life if they adopt.
The second feature is the text to inspire people for pet adoption with a question.
The third feature on the homepage consists of the link to see the gallery of pets where the users can see more details about various pets.
The fourth feature includes the special section with a name "You are missing this", which has memes of pets to create excitement in users for pet adoption. "Explore more" is a button which
redirects the users to a page where they can see more memes of pets.
"Explore more" is a button which redirects the users to a page where they can see more memes of pets.
The fifth feature on the homepage leads the user to the page where he can help the shelters and pets in different ways if they don't want to adopt the pets.
"Help Us" button helps users to land on a page where they can donate various things for pets as well as money. This page also has a feature to connect the users to volunteer opportunities where they don't have to adopt pets but they can spend time with them. This way, the user can spend some time with pets and help the shelter homes without adopting the pets.
To increase the number of follow-ups and contact to the shelter I designed a separate section “Contact Us “where people can post their queries. And there is a section for putting a post for lost pets too so that the shelter will get the notification of lost pets and help the owner to find his pet.
There is a separate page to see the details and images of pets with their characteristics. The previous pet owners can comment on the pet too about their experiences. So, the new adopter can have a better idea about the behavior of the pet.
Image Credits(pets): Directpackages.com, Pinterest.com, Cutepuppydog.net, picsart.com
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