Designed a solution for pet owners peace of mind

Researched, ideated, tested, and designed a pet-sitting platform that solves the problem of unreliable pet sitters. The challenge was that even though multiple pet-sitting platforms exist, pet owners do not feel confident letting strangers enter their homes and look after their pets due to many prior cases of negligence by pet sitters.

Introduction

Our goal was to solve the issue and promote traveling among pet owners. We used different techniques to understand the problem better and we were able to pinpoint the issues and develop a solution to add value and take away any problems they were facing.

The Problem

Over 60% of pet owners claimed to avoid traveling and attending important events as they could not find reliable pet sitters.

Empathize

Our first step was to talk to the pet owners. We gathered 5 pet owners and asked them a series of questions to analyze the problems they face with existing pet-sitting platforms and understand their expectations from a pet sitter.

Analyze

We categorized the findings into 2 major pain points, they were :

Pain Point 1 : Reliability & Accountability of pet sitters

Pain Point 2 : Ensuring the Pets are looked after properly

Define

Now that we had the problems identified and how we can approach them we looked around similar products to identify their success and shortcomings to help develop our solution.

Designing the solution

Once we had a good idea of what we were trying to build, we made a task flow showing how pet owners would book a pet sitter

Based on the task flow we sketched some solutions to visualize the look and feel of the product.

Pain Point 1 : Reliability & Accountability of pet sitters

Solutions : Stats, Badges and Photos

We introduced following features to give better understanding of pet sitters

  1. Times Hired : Shows how many times the sitter has been hired before.

  2. Satisfaction Rate : Based on the rating the pet sitter gets from previous sittings.

  3. Badges : Helps pet owners to see sitter’s credibility

  4. Tagged Photos : Shows photos uploaded by pet owners from previous sitting jobs of a pet sitter assuring the safety and giving insight into how the pet was handled.

Pain Point 2 : Ensuring the Pets are looked after properly

Solution : Message box

Adding a message feature to write custom instructions for pet’s schedule or other nesessary things pet owners might wanna let sitters know about before making the booking.

Hypothesis: Pet owners say even though the existing platforms claim to be reliable, the stories they have heard online about pets being mistreated and owners’ property damaged often do not give them confidence in booking pet sitters from these platforms.

Allowing pet owners to see the history of their pet sitter along with stats and photos from previous jobs would help resolve this. I was able to come to this conclusion as during the interviews pet owners expressed interest in knowing more about the experience previous pet owners had with the pet sitter they thinking of booking.

Hypothesis: Pet owners expect their pets to be taken care of as well as they do. They fear their pet’s schedule, food, and playtime will not be followed by pet sitters.

A message box for pet owners to write specific instructions like their pet's schedule for the pet sitter to follow would be helpful

Additionally, Introducing mandatory short training for pet sitters on how to properly care for pets before they start sitting on the platform would be beneficial and give confidence to pet owners to book pet sitters using this platform.

Rest of the screens

We sketched out the rest of the app screens showing how a user would go from the initial screen of the app to successfully booking a pet sitter of their choosing.

Validating the Solution

To see how users would interact with the screens we designed, we prototyped the flow and conducted 2 rounds of usability testing, each with 5 users. Users were asked to complete the process of booking a pet sitter.

This highlighted some usability issues, things we had missed adding to the app, and things that could be improved for a better user experience.

About Testing

Though users were able to complete the task successfully they did experience some usability issues mentioned below.

  1. Users were confused about the reason for having a filter to show verified sitters only since the product only allows verified and trained sitters to be on this platform.

  2. Users were confused by the way the applied filters were displayed.

  3. Users did not see a need to have the verified badge and found it to be redundant

4. Users wanted to see the total amount it would cost them to book for selected dates in previous steps rather than the “Hourly Rate”

5. Users wanted to see the total cost of the booking on the review page.

Improved Designs

  1. “Show verified pet sitters” was removed as it did not prove to be necessary and created confusion among users.

  2. Applied filters were split into cards to make it easy to edit for users.

  3. Verified badge was removed to as it did not prove to be necessary.

4. “Hourly Rate” was changed to “Total Cost” helping users to quickly see the total cost of their booking and also letting them see which sitter fits their budget.
5.”Total Cost” added on the review booking page.

Design System

A design library was made that holds all the design elements of Keeper. This library serves as a guide for any designer who needs to design any new element for the Keeper.

Jump to Solution

Final Product

Helping pet owners find the perfect, safe, and reliable pet sitter.

Accessibility

To ensure my product is accessible to everyone, I used Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) guidelines by testing text color contrast on colored backgrounds, meeting AAA standards for broader audience accessibility, regardless of the visual abilities of users.

Measuring Impact

Though it was a personal project I still put it in front of users to gain insight and measure the success of the product. It received positive feedback and users expressed interest in using the product as a method to solve their issues around booking pet sitters eventually allowing them to travel with peace of mind

Takeaways

I learned keeping user needs at the center of decision-making is essential for making a product they would use.

Nacho - Inspiration for Keeper