Project Overview

Ambiguity at the Beginning
‍My team and I were tasked with reaching out to the Humane Animal Rescue (HAR) center located in East Liberty, a well-recognized local multi-animal shelter that serves numerous communities around Pittsburgh. The goal? Meet with various stakeholders, including service providers and customers, establish rapport, and understand the space. Primarily, we were there to produce a design over the next two months that could significantly help the vital services the HAR was offering. This was an excitingly open-ended project, as it required us to ‘get out into the field’ and conduct our own deep, rigorous research.

Solution

Our solution was a responsive desktop and mobile website that supports the goals of both potential pet owners and rescue staff alike. The main advantage of this service is that it was designed to both match, filter, and educate potential pet owners with the pets that they were interested in before they ever set foot in the animal rescue center. This greatly decreased the likelihood that these pet owners would return pets back to the rescue center after discovering that, after all, the pet was not a good fit.

We wanted to design the app to be as easily navigable and even delightful as possible, in order to support affinity for the semi-novel matching process, which most customers had never experienced before in the realm of pet adoption.

Process

Exploratory Research
‍We started by looking up pet adoption centers in Pittsburgh. We latched onto the Humane Animal Rescue because it's one of the biggest and best adoption centers in Pittsburgh, and fairly close by (always helpful to utilize constraints to your advantage).

To get more first-hand information and empathize better, we visited the HAR near East Liberty. We observed the space, took notes, and held multiple rounds of interviews with individuals at the location, including four different sets of customers and four employees. We were also lucky enough to be able to converse with a senior manager who happened to be on-site that day, in order to gain higher-level insights of the business as a whole.

Synthesizing the Data
With the notes taken from this background and secondary research, we utilized customer journey maps and personas in order to  uncover deeper pain points that we could solve for. One prominent issue we noticed in both the lives of customers and employees was the rejection of the offer to adopt if the customer wasn't the right fit for the potential pet. This was often the lowest point in each person's respective journey.

Brainstorming Session
Now with actual people and real problem to design for, we held brainstorming sessions to bubble up all possible design ideas. No idea was off limits here! Eventually, we narrowed down to three potential designs with two storyboards each: a "Pet-tinder" for matching with potential pets, a game format to elucidate how potential owners should care for their pets, and a VR-based design to show how a pet might fit into an individual's house & lifestyle.

Validations, Testing, and Speed Dating
With our storyboards, we conducted speed dating to see which concepts individuals found most useful, or which design people most accepted in their lives. We tested with 5 users to make sure we knew that "we are not the user!"

Screen Map and Beginning to Digitize
The idea that received most positive feedback during speed dating was the "Petinder" concept, or the pet filter. Instead of letting customer to see all the animals, which may contain the candidates that are not suitable for them, we added in a profiling and matching feature. To figure out to implement the idea with a responsive website, we created a screen map to push forward an understanding of what each screen does and how they relate to one other.

Based on the screen map we made, we decided which screens were critical to our design. To ensure our features function properly on mobile devices, we started from mobile screens and are designed in parallel wireframes.

After a few rounds of testing with colleagues for heuristic violations and other critical issues, we produced higher-level wireframes. We established the responsive design format and displayed the webpage in both a desktop and app platform.

During our final pitch, we walked our audience through our research and our final prototype. We showed our design specs in terms of interactions, potential users, limitations, and future steps, and noted any critical feedback with the designs.

Reflection

We loved working on this project and hope to continue it! We visited the HAR after the conclusion of our project to see if our designs truly had the impact we wanted them to impart.

We'd like hope to expand on the profile-building process further, and allow for user flexibility in the choices of animals for which people may have a preference. We'd also like to continue to reach out to the HAR location in East Liberty to appraise interest in the ongoing project.​​​​​​​