Pet Adoption
Statement of the exercise
Millions of animals are currently in shelters and foster homes awaiting adoption. Design an experience that will help connect people looking for a new pet with the right companion for them. Help an adopter find a pet which matches their lifestyle, considering factors including breed, gender, age, temperament, and health status. Provide a high-level flow and supporting wire frames.
THE PROBLEM TO SOLVE
Not all Pets from Shelters find owners. Leading a bigger issue:
Each year, approximately 1.5 million shelter animals are euthanized (670,000 dogs and 860,000 cats).
source: https://www.aspca.org/animal-homelessness/shelter-intake-and-surrender/pet-statistics
How do we make sure that the adoption demand covers most of the adoption offer from the Shelters?
Including older pets, pets with disabilities, and less popular pets (aside from cats and dogs)
Research
I just put some quick ideas on paper to have a clearer picture of the subject
Leads to solve the problem
Who are our Users?
Pet Shelter & Rescue Organization Staff: We need to provide them tools (dashboards, reporting, etc.) to monitor their pet inventory, promote some of their pets in the discover section of the app and see their in person appointments with potential adopters.
Adopters: We need to provide them with effective and fun tools to help them in their pet research (from the initial pet adoption idea to the adoption itself at the Shelter, to the follow up after the adoption.
Future adopters we are reaching, have already a lot of preconceived (and less preconceived) ideas in mind. They need positive reinforcement and advices
Users’ perception of animal shelters:
“Animal from shelters are less likely to be happy because they are not well taken care of”
How do we make the shelters look more appealing:
By Educating people about the fact that shelters are actually great places to adopt from.
Positive facts about shelters (sourced from https://www.petakids.com/photos/cute-facts-animals-shelters/)
Some adopters go to breeders, because they want a certain type of breed that they believe they can only get from a breeder.
Twenty-five percent of dogs in animal shelters are purebreds.
It's cheaper to adopt from a Shelter than a from Pet Store.
User perception of older pets:
“Older pets are high maintenance and require more attention”
How do we make them look more adoptable?
By educating users about older pets. There are many benefits from having older pets, such as:
Older dogs have manners. Unlike puppies, many grown-up dogs have spent years living with a family and being socialized to life with humans.
Senior pets are less destructive. Most older adoptive pets are well past the search-and-destroy phase.
What you see is what you get. A senior pet holds no surprises as to how big he might get, what color his adult coat will be, or whether his hips will be healthy.
You can be a hero to a deserving dog or cat. Almost without exception, people who adopt older animals feel a special sense of pride and purpose in opening their heart to a hard-to-place pet. Doing a good thing really does make you feel good!
These are benefits we can advertise on our consumer app to promote older pets.
To summarize, I can see 2 main goals for this product:
Adopters' Awareness:
Highlight the positive benefits that go with adopting older or disabled pets, and make adopters aware and excited about the advantages of adopting through a Shelter.Shelters' empowerment:
Enable pet experts, such as the Shelter staff, to strategically guide adopters in finding the best match using data gathered from our product.
I really wanted to make the entire adoption Journey taken care by our products. From the on-boarding to the actual pet adoption.
Which led me to more broken-down objectives:
Help adopters to find the pets they are really looking for, not only the pet they had initially in mind before being educated about it:
Dog Adoption in general and more specifically Old Dogs Adoption Will Build Life Lessons for Kids of All Ages
Older dogs are often already trained.
Rabbits and Rodents require less attention.
Younger Dogs require more time than older dogs.
Reassure them about benefits of adopting less popular pets: older pets, pets with disabilities, rabbits...
Enable Shelters' staff to suggest some pets through our consumer products.
Guide them through the entire adoption process. To address both what they want and what we want.
Help adopters to take care of their pets on the long run, to prevent returns.
Quick STORYBOARD
Definition of an MVP
I quickly assigned user stories/features to the main parts of our products.
We need to provide to the adopters:
a guided search, the discover section, so our users can browse seamlessly through our recommended pets
an advanced search experience to enable our users to browse through the entire database of pets, and allows them to filter by their specific criteria
Ways to meet the pets in person.
Notifications through emails and native OS pushes to keep our users actively engaged in their search
Adopters need to be notified of upcoming appointment at shelters, new match with pets matching their criteria or just because our machine learning algorithm knows it is likely that this specific user will match with the pet.
We need to provide to the Shelter staff:
ways to communicate with the adopters.
optimize their pets presence on our consumer app
APP WIREFRAMES
I have learnt through working at match.com that users are more likely to fill their profiles by going through very simple step by step questionnaires. By having them answer only the mandatory most important questions, we can enable our algorithm to match effectively adopters with pets. I provide only a few questions examples.
Regarding the app structure, I really wanted to keep the user flow simple by having only three universes: The main and most editorialized one is the Discover Section, where user can scroll through a list of what we, the product, think that the user might be interested in, based on their profile, search criteria and prioritization insights from shelters.
The ad list should be infinite and addictive.
Users can filter through this discover list to create very specific searches (I am missing a saved search feature). That way, we can address our two different personas. One that needs to be more guides, and the other one that wants to be independent and is not ready (yet) for too much insight.
The second universe is the most fun of the app: a Tinder like experience, called "Around Me", where users can see one nearby pet profile at a time. The displayed pets would come from their closest shelters, and match some of the users' criteria. Each time a user taps on the star icon, the pet ad would be saved to "my favorite pets" section (see below)
The third universe is the "me" section, where users can access everything which is related to them: their favorite pets, visits messages
Pets ads are our raw material and can be accessed through searches and ad lists (such as in my favorites). From an pet ads, users can schedule an appointment to meet the pet at the shelter.
For each actions, such as signing up or adopting a pet at the shelter, an email would be sent to congratulate, guide and reassure the adopter.
I wanted to avoid any disconnection between the app and the user throughout this whole adoption process.
SIGN UP Flow
Very simple step by step flow, with one question at a time, one or two taps max.
The 3 universes
The landing page will be the discover section where the user can see all recommended ads and tips/guidance about adopting older pets, shelters. Users will be able to filter the list with their own criteria. The tips can also show up on the loading pages of the other screens, such as the Around me section.
On the Around me section, users will only see one pet ad at the same time. They will have to swipe left to dismiss a card, and swipe right to add the pet to their favorites. Key features of the pet will be featured over each picture.
The third universe will be dedicated to all user activities: Favorite pets, play date/appointments/visits and messages.
The "Me" Section and ITS subnav
Profile Page
The profile page needs to provide detailed information about the Pet, and honor its pictures. Users can also add a pet to their favorite list.
APP MOCK UPS
SIGN UP / PROFILE CAPTURE UI
The UI goal here was to provide a fun and delightful experience through a play and refreshing look and feel. Vibrant colors and gradients, cute logo and imagery to play on the fact that people love pets and everything related to them (image, videos, fun facts...)
Welcome email
A key part of this user journey is the communication with adopters so that adopters can be kept posted about their activity on the app. I came with a CRM solutions to answer that need.
After Signing up, and part of our CRM solution, we would a email to welcome our new users and guide them through their journey at SAVE A PET.
MATCH EMAIL + NATIVE OS NOTIFICATION
Users would also get email notifications when we think a pet is a great match and worth sending.
APP UI
Here are the screens for our app. I decided to explore outside of Material Design to provide my reviewers with a more personal Journey :)
PROTOTYPE ON INVISION
To explain how I see interactions and to provide more clarity, I thought it was important to come up with a prototype. I used invision, which I find very intuitive and straight-forward, but often lacks of depth when it comes to micro UX and more complex interactions
If the embed is not working, please click on the following url to view the prototype:
DASHBOARDS FOR SHELTERS
In addition to our consumer App, I'd like to provide a desktop dashboard to staff at Shelters. This would enable them to manage their content (ads, shelter's information...)
and promote pets that did not get enough visibility so that they can get adopted faster.
The top section shows what pets they decided to promote in the discover universe of our consumer app. This number has to be limited so these ads do not get lost too far in the list.
DASHBOARD UI
FOLLOW UP EMAIL
Part of our CRM solution, users would get a follow up email after adopting their pet, in order to keep the return rate as low as possible. We would provide redirections to content dedicated to helping owners to take care of their pets
