Happy Paws 🐾 - Dog Walking App
🧐 Problem
Sometimes, busy individuals who are dog owners need help taking care of their pets’ needs, especially their daily exercise. Although, the dog owners need to know their doggo is in safe hands with the dog walker. The key and common factors that dog owners highly prioritize are the trustworthiness of the dog walker, nearby service, and affordable rates.
Users want an application that they can use to get quality pet walking time while ensuring the safety of their doggo.
💡 Solution
Here comes -- Happy Paws, a concept app!
Happy Paws is designed to provide you and your doggo with the safest and most reliable experience with your matched dog walker!
Dog owners can search for nearby dog walkers based on their experience level, certifications, availability, and reviews. In addition, dog owners can chat in the app with dog walkers before confirming a booking!
🗣 My Role & Responsibilities
Using Figma as a UX/UI designer, I was responsible for conducting user research, market research, creating user flows, wireframes, and prototyping, while thinking of the user’s experience and user’s interactions.
Team: myself and Dribbble Product Design course classmates
📝 User Research
In order to truly understand what the dog owners really want for their doggos, I conducted surveys and interviews with 3 separate dog owners.
I asked each dog owner about what their experience was like with dog care; pet sitting, dog walking, grooming, etc. The responses were interesting as no one uses a service for walking their doggos; only used dog daycare.
Through the interviews, it was clear what the major pain points were.
To further understand how one can build more trust with the dog walker, my coursemates and I brainstormed together what factors are considered to be a safe and reputable dogwalker.
I found this part of the process intriguing as I was able to take these points to make into a cohesive user flow.
📚 Market Research
It’s important to research and analyze existing apps because it gives you a feel of how competitive the market can be. In this case, it is. I took a good look at two competitors, Rover and Wag!.
👤 User Persona
In order to understand the user, creating a persona helps put certain factors into perspective.
Meet Janine Peters, a hard-working busy millennial who has a cute doggo, but struggles to find time to walk her doggo.
🔁 User Flow
Based on the insights and analysis from both user and market research, I developed a user flow that shows the informative & easy flow of booking a trustworthy dogwalker for a very busy individual like Janine Peters.
🛠️ Wireframes
Now that we have a basic user flow ready, I can start to conceptualize my designs into wireframes. The purpose is to illustrate the user flow and how it addresses & meets the dog owner’s requirements and needs.
Low-Fidelity
First, I made a couple of rough sketches to get a general idea of how and where I would like to place certain elements/components.
High-Fidelity
Once I got a better idea of how I wanted the components to be placed, I started to explore the layout designs within the wireframes. That’s when I understood how important it is to intentionally design and gave me a glimpse of true design thinking.
🎨 Visual Design
Once the layout has been solidified, it’s time to move on to the visual aesthetics of the app!
I explored and designed different iterations for a few of the wireframes. The goal is to make the user feel safe! With that in mind, I played around with different colors, fonts, and styles, while also adding some bubbly and dog-friendly elements.
Moodboard
Typography + Colors
Components
✨ Final Designs
🔍 Usability Testing & Iteration
After finalizing how the design, I created a prototype for Happy Paws. I tested my prototype with users and collected feedback and iterated on ways to improve the prototype (flow, sequence, design).
📱Prototype
Sign-Up
Onboarding Profiles
Book a Walker
✅ Learnings/Conclusions
Overall, building an app for dog walkers was a very fun and tedious process! I learned a lot from the step of researching to the final step of measuring and analyzing the app. The goal is to establish trust between the dog owners and dog walkers, which was quite the challenge!
Spacing out components and creating bubbly and minimal designs taught me how to design the experience for the user. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the details of design, but also need to remember what the app is serving its function for.
Thank you for taking your time to look at my case study!
Please don't hestiate to reach out for comments or questions - would love to connect!
