Background
As humans, we longed for the feeling of belonging; the company of a dog or a cat helps us feel sane in this crazy busy world. But having a pet means having responsibilities that sometimes can be hard for us while we're working full-time. For example, having a pet can make travelling a bit complicated when you don't have anyone to take care of your beloved pet when you're away.
How it all began
True story: I have two beloved dogs, Bơ and Đậu (their name means Avocado and Beans, in case you wonder) and having to travel frequently for business and family visits are not always easy for me. I have to look for a place for them to stay while I'm away, and as I don't want to send them to pet hotels, it makes the matter a bit more complicated.
Being a pet parent myself, even when it comes to pet hotels, I know too well the lack of facilities when trying to book a pet stay with kennels. Especially during peak periods and holidays season, places around the city were quite booked out.
- Bơ, my then 4-month-old golden retriever seemed a little shaken up after previously boarding at a kennel. It was a very impersonal experience and it was something that I'd rather not have to make him go through again. One time I had to fly overseas, and it was very lucky that my colleague and her mom agreed to let Bo stay with them and their dogs. They were lovely people, and I trust that Bơ will have the best care when staying with them, and I still remember how relief and grateful I was at that moment.
Reading this, you might ask: why not looking for someone in your area to look after you dog? At the time, pet home boarding is not popular in Vietnam, not even now. I brought up the story in a casual conversation with my friends, and it turns out the problem is very much common among single pet-parent (be it a single dad or single mom). So we asked ourselves, why not make an app for this? We can have some fun, as it's something we both love, and it's a great exercise to have some brain workout as well.
Research
- Competitor analysis
So we had an idea that pet owners have this problem but we don’t know to what extent and how we can solve it. Before diving into the solution-creating process, we decided to spend some time research on products that are already on the market that help with caring for pets.
Competitor analysis
After a few hours going through reports, product reviews, and endless scrolling through websites and app store, we’ve learnt two things:
- - Pet care services are not new. There are many apps and websites around the world where you can buy and sell services for pet (dog walking, dog boarding, pet sitting) but the concept is still relatively new in Vietnam.
- - However, when most of the apps act as a platform to connect pet owners with pet sitters, the process of choosing the right pet sitter can be quite tedious and time-consuming.
- Research Insight
Due to the lack of time and resources, we didn’t do quantitative research. Instead, we started by talking to pet parents to understand further the kind of problem they frequently encountered. This is actually what gave us much insight on to how we can build our product to solve " the problem"
We distilled all the insights that we gathered to some prominent pain points that we saw are emerging:
- 1. Pet parents don’t want to keep their pet in cage, but there is not many options out there to choose from. Friends and family are not always available to help.
- 2. Pet parents want their beloved pets to experience minimum distress when they are away, and the majority of them agree that it'd be much better to have their pets taken care of at somewhere resembles the most similar environment to their own home.
3. The long process of going through a whole list of pet sitters , search, browse, reviews, compare and choose before starting to contact pet sitter in person is not in favour by our pet parent. Sometimes, after going through this whole long process, the chosen pet sitter is unavailable for the job. It all seems like a never-ending circle with a lot of frustrations along the way.
Seeing all this information grouped together was very helpful, but now we need a way to keep this information grounded and applicable to move forward.
Personas
Personas is a great tool that help to build an empathetic lens so that we can see things from the perspective of the users we design for. For this project, we created two user personas to help us keep insights grounded and to guide our design decisions and priorities. Meet Linda Trang — the pet parent, and Thuy Van — the (potential) pet sitter.
Linda Trang – the pet owner
Thuy Van – the pet sitter
Experience map
To pull in more specific information from our interviews, we used Journey maps to go through a typical event when the pet owner is looking for a place to stay for her pet, and when a potential user wants to become a registered pet sitter.
The pet owner
The pet sitter
Both helped us better understand the unique journey that pet parents and pet sitters are going through and their pain points. Having this information grounded also helps us to define real users’ problems and identify opportunities. We started to solidify the ideas into a prototype.
Flows
After chosen the features that we are going to develop, it was time to create a user flow to identify the screens that we needed so we could proceed to iterate on the structure of each screen to make it as functionally sound as possible.
We look into 2 separated flows on our app:
- - The process that PO has to go through when looking for a pet sitter
- - The pet sitter application process
The flow of looking for a pet sitter
To help pet owners make their decision easier, the geo-based auto-matching feature enables the app to show the top 10 suitable candidates that best suit for the job pre-defined by pet owners. By limiting the initial choice to only 10, we aim to help users focus more on the recommended pet sitters, rest assured that they were selected to best suit the pre-defined criteria, both location-based and service-based. The PO can choose to see more pet sitters if the first 10 is not suitable. Furthermore, we allow pet owners to contact 3 pet sitters at the same time before committing to pay, to avoid last-minute disappointment and give them more control.
How to become a registered pet sitter
With our app, we aim to provide the most transparent and comprehensive requirements for those who want to become a registered pet sitter. They will be asked to provide personal details, security check, etc. This process will help us to ensure the quality of our pet sitters, and in turn, to further assure pet owners when they book on our platform.
In short, pet sitters only start getting job request after:
- - They provided all the required information to our platform (personal and security check)
- - They got approved by our platform.
Extensive research to decide on the flow
Ideation
With the ideas in mind, we proceed to create some lo-fi prototypes on paper. We came up with several potential executions to each of the pain points. This was the first time we employed the use of paper prototype testing, and it certainly helped us a lot in identifying some design problems and fix them earlier in the process.
Prototype
After having a more refined version of our final design, we jumped into Sketch to create some med-fi mockups and do some further testing. This allows us to deploy the “test early and frequently” approach, and continuously fixing and refining the design.
Some mid-fi sketches of the app
UI Design
We had some considerations for the overall look and feel, and the direction of the application’s appearance. We created a mood board to help us deciding the tone that we want our app to make our users feel.
After having a more refined version of our final design, we jumped into Sketch to create some med-fi mockups and do some further testing. This allows us to deploy the “test early and frequently” approach, and continuously fixing and refining the design.
After much consideration, we decided to go for an earthy tone as we believe it delivers a warm and reliable, trustworthy message.
We jumped on Sketch again to make some hi-fi prototypes and used inVision to make an interactive prototype.
Final Design
Learnings and what's next
When we first started this project, figuring out how the app works was quite stressful. We do it not only for fun, but also to exercise our design thinking mind. To make sense of it and ensure that people understand it at a glance is certainly not easy. But hey, we did it. It might not be the best idea out there, but for us, this is worth exploring.
If we’re being honest, in our final design, we were not able to cover all of our design ideas. Nonetheless, we would want to explore some of those ideas in our next update:
- 1. Response rate: Admit it, we don’t want to send out a message and only receive the “seen” receipt without any response. We want all of our pet sitters on the platform to be more responsive, that’s why we’d like to introduce response rate to assess their activeness on our chat system. Having this helps OMP to control the quality of our pet sitters as well as informing pet owners on how active the pet sitter is.
- 2. Badges: Badge systems is another idea that we want to integrate into our system to reward pet sitters. The more badges they gained, the more popular they become, and also, be exposed to more jobs. This idea is also to make our platform fun and more engaging.