Designed a solution to help pet owners travel freely.
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.
Overview
As a pet parent, I often have to skip traveling to new places. I live in Toronto and since it’s a big city you always hear stories of theft and mishaps. Considering this, I never felt comfortable letting strangers into my house, especially around my dog when I was not there. I spent some time talking to other pet owners and researching online and realized I was not alone and other pet owners felt the same way.
There had to be a better way.
Nacho - Inspiration behind Keeper
Over 60% of pet owners claimed to avoid traveling and attending important events as they could not find reliable pet sitters.
Problem Statement
Empathizing
The goal was to solve this issue to promote traveling among pet owners while ensuring the pets and their houses' safety.
The first step was to talk to the pet owners. I gathered 5 pet owners asked them a series of questions and analyzed their answers. This qualitative research helped me understand their experience with pet-sitting services, and their expectations from a pet sitter.
Analyzing
I categorized the research findings into 2 major pain points, they were:
1. Reliability & Accountability of pet sitters
Existing platforms claim to be reliable but are not.
Stories about pets being mistreated, property damage, and theft do not give confidence to pet owners booking through these platforms.
Hypothesis
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 are thinking of booking.
2. Ensuring the pets are looked after properly
Pet owners expect pet sitters to maintain their pets' routines and needs.
There's a fear that pet sitters may not follow the pet's schedule, food, and playtime requirements.
Hypothesis
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, mandatory training for pet sitters on properly caring for pets before they become sitters on the platform would be beneficial and give confidence to pet owners to book pet sitters using this platform.
Defining
How might we make pet owners feel confident in their pet sitters so that they can travel knowing their pet and house are in safe hands?
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.
Visualizing the Solution
Based on the task flow we sketched some solutions to visualize how the designed solution would solve the pain points.
1. Reliability & Accountability of pet sitters
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.
2. 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.
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, 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.
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
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.
1.
Before: Applied filters bar confused the users.
After: Applied filters were split into cards.
2.
Before: Users found the verified badge to be redundant.
After: Verified badge was removed as it did not prove to be necessary.
3.
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.
4.
Before: Missing “Total cost” on review booking page.
After: “Total Cost” added.
5.
Design System
Next we made a design library 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.
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.