Pawnder
First time young-adult adopters often struggle with decision making and processes involved with pet adoption. With emphasis on interaction and information design, Pawnder aims to enable future pet parents to find the right animal companion for them and help bring them home.
Role: Designer
Team: 5 People
Themes: Interaction Design, Design systems, Socially Responsive Design
Timespan: 14 weeks
Research
Understanding
The Problem Space
We started our research by visiting adoption centers for cats and dogs and made observations.
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We continued this research with literature review and an analysis of websites for pet adoption.
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After initial observations and considering the availability of resources, we came up with a problem statement.
How might we design a solution that streamlines the adoption process for young adult first-time pet adopters?
We continued our research and used several tried and true use research methods to know more about pet adoption and the experience around it.
Semi- strucutured Interviews
We reached out to 7 young adults who have adopted pets and had varying levels of experience with pet adoption.
The notes from these interviews were encoded and with affinity mapping we aimed to identify similar themes and draw insights. This research process provided us with some key findings which enabled us to develop our design requirements.
Observation of Shelters
Analysis of Adoption Websites
Literature Review
Semi-structured Interviews
Key Findings
1 Young adults are more tech-savvy and wish the adoption process was more 'online', there were multiple complaints with the existing online systems.
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2 First-time adopters usually do not have experience with raising and taking care of pets. Even when they have had pets growing up, primary care giving responsibilities lied with the parent or guardian.
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3 Adopters conduct varied amounts of research before adopting a pet, in order to understand lifestyle changes, budgetary constraints and, their own preferences.
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4 Major motivation for adopting pets is wanting a companion for emotional support.
Hierarchical
Task Analysis
We conducted a hierarchical task analysis of the process of choosing a pet to understand the steps invovled.
Design
Design Requirements
Informed by our research, we developed our design requirements.
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1 Our design should not assume that users have prior knowledge of pet adoption.
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2 Technology savviness of young adults should reflect in the design solution.
3 Our design should accommodate users with sensory issues.
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4 Implementation of our design solution should be affordable for adopters and shelters.
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5 Information about pets needs to be clearly and accurately communicated.
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6 Including a diverse variety of pets should be an aim of the design solution.
Design Process
Ideation
Storyboarding
Sketching
Wireframing
Visual Design
Prototyping
Ideation
Each team member carried out a crazy 8's activity after which we brainstormed to finalize our top ideas. Here are some of those ideas.
1 One idea was to connect new adopters to with shelter volunteers as mentors to guide them from beginning to end from home and get as much done without coming to the shelter.
Out of these and several others we picked Pawnder as the idea to go ahead with. Pawnder is an app that is centered around swiping pictures of pets left or right as would do in a dating application and then when you have a list of prospective pets you like, you will shortlist them until you have your top favorite ones and you can then reach out to the shelter the pet is at. In summary Pawnder stands out in the following ways:
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1. Interaction style (swiping for dating) is popular among young adults.
2. Easy to give choices for pets across species.
3. Allows us to incorporate pets from several shelters on one platform.
Storyboarding
Our top idea was Pawnder, a dating style app for people to adopt pets. I developed a storyboard to illustrate a situation in which a user might benefit from such a tool.
Freddie and Fiona live in a one bedroom apartment.
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They like to have friends over on weekends.
Wireframes
The team got to wireframing the screens that the user will go through as they use Pawnder for their pet adoption needs.​ We divided the wireframes into four broad categories to begin deciding what screens we will need.
1 Screens (left to right) with swipe-able cards, List of liked pets and expanded profile of pets.
Design Language
The design language was developed keeping in mind that we are trying to create a soothing and less overwhelming visual experience for our users.
Typography
Prototype
We created the high fidelity prototype to test out the swiping capabilities and to replicate a narrative similar to the storyboard.
Reflection
We conducted user testing and reflected on the feedback collected and see the following points as opportunities for further inquiry.
Limited Opportunities for Escape
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​Our prototype does not allow for users to leave the narrowing down process, the only way to do that would be to undo your choices when or before you have 50 pets in the list. This does restrict our users from escaping the narrowing down process.
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The intent behind locking users into the narrow down process was to deter them from scrolling through pictures of cute pets for leisure, so we thought it best to design such that users' choices are intentional. ​
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In the paper we wrote, we did talk about a reset feature in the settings allowing users to nullify their list and choices and start again. This can be a big decision to make, further influencing users to make informed choices.​
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Learnings​
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After the problem definition, we did divide roles among researchers and designers, I was focused on design, ideation and prototyping. However, due to time constraints, I did get the opportunity to interview one user, which was a very insightful experience for me. Moreover, I participated actively in the affinity mapping and reading the notes from various users informed my design decisions, here is one example.​
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I could prioritize repetitive themes in my design, for example users often commented how they find all dogs cute and feel sorry for them at the shelter which makes it hard for them to make a decision. This led me to propose locking users in for narrowing down after 50 choices.​​​​​​