🗒️ Overview
Traveling among pet owners is very limited because they have difficulty finding reliable pet sitters. I spent 6 weeks exploring different possibilities and developing a viable solution to this problem.
Over 60% of pet owners claim to avoid making travel plans and attending important events as they can not find reliable pet sitters.
Source: Press telegram📝 Problem Statement
🔍 Research
My research started with understanding pet owners’ expectations of their pet sitter. For this, I prepared a questionnaire with 10 questions and sent it out to 20 pet owners. Using an affinity map I analyzed the interview findings, I found 2 major pain points.
1.
2.
Questionable reliability and accountability
Ensuring the pets are looked after properly
Pet owners have come across multiple stories of pets being mistreated, property damage and theft makes pet owners feel hesitant.
Pet owners expect sitters to maintain their pet’s routines.
After discoving the major pain points I formed a question to guide my solution.
How might we make pet owners feel confident in pet sitters?
🤏Defining
☝️ Initial Proposal
Since the goal was to make a digital product to solve the problem, I put together this initial proposal based on my research findings.
Allowing pet owners to see the history of their pet sitter along with stats and photos from previous jobs would help resolve this.
Before they join the platform, mandatory training for pet sitters would reassure pet owners and boost their confidence in booking sitters.
A message box for pet owners to provide specific instructions, such as their pet's schedule, would be helpful for pet sitters.
✍ Visualizing proposed solution
Questionable reliability and accountability
Solutions: Stats, Badges and Photos
Times Hired: Shows how many times the sitter has been hired before.
Satisfaction Rate: Based on the rating the pet sitter gets from previous sittings.
Badges: Helps pet owners to see sitter’s credibility
Tagged Photos: Shows photos uploaded by pet owners from previous sitting jobs giving insight into how the pet was handled.
Ensuring the pets are looked after properly
Solution: Message box
Adding a message feature to write custom instructions for a pet’s schedule or other necessary things pet owners might wanna let sitters know about before making the booking.
🧾 Task Flow
Next, I made the task flow showing the steps the user would take to book a pet sitter.
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.
🖵 Rest of the screens
👨🔬 Validating the Solution
To see how users would interact with the screens we designed, I prototyped the flow and ran 2 rounds of usability tests, each with 5 users. Users were asked to complete the process of booking a pet sitter.
This highlighted some usability issues, things I had not considered, and things that could be improved for a better user experience.
Though users completed the task successfully they did experience some usability issues mentioned below. Additionally, I also made changes to the copy and design for clarity and better usability as some users were confused about it.
🧪 About Testing
1. Before: Users were confused about the “show verified sitters only” filter since the platform only allows verified and trained sitters to be on this platform.
After: “Show verified pet sitters” was removed as it did not prove to be necessary and created confusion among users.
2.Before: Applied filters bar confused the users.
After: Applied filters were split into cards.
3. Before: Users found the verified badge to be redundant.
After: Verified badge was removed as it did not prove to be necessary.
4. Before: Users wanted to see the total amount for booking rather than the “Hourly Rate”.
After: “Hourly Rate” was changed to “Total Cost” also helping them see which sitter fits their budget.
5. Before: Missing “Total cost” on the review booking page.
After: “Total Cost” added.
⚙️ Design System
Since this was a new product we put together from scratch, we made a design library that holds all the design elements of Keeper. The library serves as a guide for any designer who needs to design a new element for Keeper.
🤘Final Product
Keeper: Empowering pet owners find the perfect sitters and travel freely,
Jump to Solution
👀 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.
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.
📏 Measuring Impact
I learned keeping user needs at the center of decision-making is essential for making a product they would use.
📋 Takeaways
Nacho - Inspiration behind Keeper