This project was done for the Product Designer course here on Dribbble. The assignment was to create a dog walker app. I was responsible for 100% of the design process, including user research, wireframes, prototyping, and UX writing.

Initial Research

My first step was to do some research to serve as a starting point. I downloaded several existing apps and visited several websites and made notes about what I liked and didn't. I asked a couple of my dog-owning friends about some of their experiences and ideas using a Google form.

You can see some of the questions and responses from one of the interviews in the screenshot below.

The User

I created a user persona to refer to during the design process. This user was loosely based on a friend of mine who is a dog owner.

User Flow

I created a user flow for onboarding and booking an appointment to facilitate the creation of the screens. This user flow remained mostly consistent throughout the design process.

Wireframes

I created several wireframe sketches and finally arrived on a set I liked. Then I created medium-fidelity wireframes to serve as the foundation for the design.

High-Fidelity Mockups

After having my dog-owning friends take a look at my wireframes and receiving feedback from my mentor, I proceeded with creating the high-fidelity mockups.

Prototyping

My mentor gave me some helpful feedback on my visual elements, so I made some changes and went on to creating the prototype.

I included some micro-interactions for some of the form field elements to increase interactivity and fidelity to the finished product, added some elements to improve user-friendliness, and changed some elements based on user feedback.

Final Mockup

After making numerous changes based on mentor and user feedback, I finally arrived at the mockup you see below.

Some of the changes implemented were:

• Removing the favorites heart from the cards on the search page.

• Changing the heart from white to red to appear on more background colors.

• Adding the duration of the walk to the booking page.

• Adding the price of the walker to the profile page.

• Including the total price to the booking page.

• Reducing the width of the booking button by removing the word "Now".

• Adding more information to the confirmation page.

• Adding a cute illustration to the bottom of the confirmation page.

Challenges

The thing I found most difficult about this process was the lack of users for proper research, as well as time constraints. Since I don't have many friends who own dogs, and most of those don't use dog walking services, I was limited in the amount and depth of research I could conduct in a short timeframe and with no budget.

Additionally, with limited time available for each step of the process, I was limited in the scope of what I could accomplish. I would have liked to dive deeper into what users found useful and what they might change about the app, and to find users who had more experience using existing solutions. Then I could have made further iterations to refine the design.