Faith Jin

The Challenge

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 Vision

For this assignment I wanted to create an app that would:

• Help users find a dog without becoming overwhelmed while showcasing the dog's personality.
• Help users more easily come to a consensus on which dog to adopt when making a joint decision.

Discovery

Users

This app involves a two sided market. It involves shelters that are putting the dogs up for adoption (such as the Los Angeles Humane Society) and users that are searching for a dog to adopt. In order to discover and validate pain points I conducted a quick survey utilizing Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Screener Questions

In order to obtain accurate information, I initially asked broad questions that would give me a good idea on whether or not they are a good candidate for the app. Although this app is designed for those that are looking to adopt a dog, I’ve still included those that have already adopted a dog because their experience is still valuable in uncovering pain points. I’ve also still kept those that will maybe adopt a dog to understand what they would expect the experience to be. I discarded the responses of users that indicated that they were not interested in adopting a dog (either now or in the future).

What I learned

• The process of finding the right dog can take anywhere from a few hours to a few years.

• The most difficult part of finding the right dog: I kept this question open ended but was able to sort through and narrow it down to a few major categories. Finding the right breed, personality, and sifting through a large number of potential dogs. One particular person said that it was such a large decision to make, so it made it difficult to fully commit.

• How did you decide on that dog? Most answers were directly related to personality. Here are a few quotes: “My wife and I made a joint decision based on its needs and personality.”, “I looked for a friendly dog that would get along with my 3-year-old daughter.”, “She fit with our family, and got along with everyone!”, “He chose me. It was clear from the start I had no choice in the matter. He saw me and that was it.”

• What is the most important deciding factor on selecting a dog? Again, many answers related directly to personality. The next most common answers related to breed, characteristics (such as energy level) and size.

• I have a friend that has adopted a dog recently with her boyfriend. It made me realize that in many instances, dogs are not decided upon by a singular person but 2 or more. With that idea in mind, I also asked the users: Who decides on which dog to adopt? 

in the shelter's perspective

For this assignment I focused mostly on the perspective of users that are searching for a dog to adopt. On the flip side, shelters face pain points of their own. A quick Google search allowed me to uncover a few key problems. 

• Some dogs are just more difficult to find homes for than others for a variety of reasons. Even though they do not have any health or behavior issues, people utilize stereotypes and biases before getting to know the individual dog. This happens mostly for certain breeds of dogs (such as pitbulls), older dogs (people often opt for puppies), and black dogs. (Source: http://tvblogs.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/12/dogs-least-likely-to-be-adopted/)
• Most facilities are also often overcrowded. This leads to euthanization or the inability to take in more dogs. (Source: http://www.dailytribune.net/opinion/animal-shelter-faces-challenges/article_65ceb5dc-0b7f-11e4-8ce8-0019bb2963f4.html)

competitive analysis

Direct Competitors

Indirect Competitors

Influencers

Assessment

Task Flow

A very high-level overview of the user's journey from not having a dog all the way to actually adopting a dog. 

Design

Sketches

Before diving into developing wireframes on the computer, I first do quick sketches on post-its. It helps to get an overview of the workflow before getting into the details. 

Wireframes

After getting an understanding of the overall workflow of the product, I developed wireframes in Sketch to better define the functionality and information priority. 

Detailed view

A deeper look into the wireframes and how I validated my design choices.

1 vs 2 columns

I asked users to pretend that they were looking for a dog to adopt and select which layout they preferred. The larger images did slightly better but the results are not significantly significant. It may be due to random chance that the larger images are performing better. Ultimately, I decided to go with the one column grid. The paradox of choice tells us that too many choices can lead to psychological stress, and the smaller images may cause users to place too much emphasis on the appearance of the dog rather than the personality. 

Static images vs GIFs

Certain dog breeds have been stereotyped in a negative way. I wanted to test if utilizing GIFs would help break the stereotype and allow people to better understand the personality of the dog. I conducted an A/B test seen below, in one mockup Mollie the Rottweiler is a static image, and in the other she is a GIF. Overall, in both versions people attached personality traits such as: sweet, lovable, and friendly to her. In the static image, however, she got assigned many negative keywords such as unhappy, aggressive, and unpredictable.

My hypothesis was that people would be able to associate more personality traits to a GIF/video but after testing I found that people were able to assign on average 3.238 keywords the static image and 3.421 keywords to the GIF. In conclusion, the statistical significance between the number of keywords assigned remains inconclusive, but overall users find her to be more happy and trustworthy in the GIF. 

GIFs are used sparingly. If everything is moving, users wouldn't know where to look. To create a better sense of hierarchy, GIFs are reserved for 'featured dogs' (which are dogs deemed less adoptable such as certain breeds and older dogs).

first impressions

When users are browsing through the list of dogs it's important to give them enough info to make the decision on whether or not to find out more detailed information but at the same time not overwhelm them. I conducted a quick survey in order to discover key components that are the most important to people. The survey listed characteristics along with a Likert-type scale that ranged from very unimportant to very important. The characteristics with higher numbers are those that are most important. 

While most dog adoption apps very prominently display information such as: breed and gender, I found that those are not the most important. I chose to highlight:

• Name
• Age
• Size
• Personality Traits

mockups

There are many different design languages and every company approaches it differently. For this assignment I chose to utilize many of the fundamentals of material design to showcase my flexibility in implementing different brand styles.

Next Steps

In order for an app to be most effective, it must meet the needs of all those involved. For this app I placed the focus on users that were trying to find a new furry addition to their family. Adoption shelters have their own set of user needs and goals that I have not yet covered. Generally, business objectives and user experience go hand and hand but there are situations where they do not line up. 

I placed a constraint on this assignment which was that this was going to be for dogs only. There is potential for this project to expand to accommodate other animals. 

Time Taken

This assignment took approximately 10 hours. This includes the time it took to create user tests/surveys but does not include the time it took to collect the data. This also does not include the time taken to put together this webpage.