Case Study dog walking app
Meet WOOF!
Woof is an app for searching and booking dog walkers. Woof provides easy jet advance searching options to find the best dog walker. Woof ensures trust between dog owners and dog walkers thanks to easy messaging features. The app also provides detailed information about dog walkers and verifies all profiles, thanks to which dog owners can feel safe and trust the dog walker.
Woof is designed to help dog owners feel safe and confident when they need help taking care of their pets.
Challenges
ensure trust between dog owner and dog walkers
ensure smooth and easy communication
help dog owners find the most suitable dog walkers
My Role & responsibilities
My role on this project was to work on design of the product from research to delivery. I’ve worked with a great team and mentor, who was there to always support and teach. During the project we have conducted brainstorms together and share our progress through design app.
user research
user flow
sketch & wireframe
Visual design
prototype
user testing
iteration
Get to know the user
Who is a user? What is the problem we’re trying to solve? What are the users’ needs and pain points? Initial assumptions
Dog owners - people who can't take dog for walk, older, middle-age busy, sick
Needs:
schedule dog walks in advance
easy connection with a walker
simple way of paying
choose most suitable dog walker for their dogs
finding dog walkers in the area
Pain points:
security (stranger have to have a key to dog owner home)
safety (dog are treated as a family members)
Motivations to use an app:
while sickness
every day use
help during work time
Is the a need for that kind of app? Secondary research
Target audience
I defined that the target audience of this app are people in the age between 25 to 45, they have a dog or dogs, they are working full time and they are animal lovers.
Introducing the user - persona
After establishing a target audience I conducted interviews with potential users that have fitted the target audience profile. From interviews I was able to get insights that have helped me to create a persona.
Understanding the market
To better understand the market I have conducted a competitive audit. When analyzing the competitors app I was focused on how they engage trust between dog owners and walkers, is there any verification process that dog walkers must go through, also I covered what infos are on the dog walker profile and some pros and cons of the competitors products. This allowed me to identify some gaps and opportunities.
Gaps:
no accessibility considerations
dog walkers profiles, informations are not highlight
contact with walker is hard (petsitter only by phone, pawshaker- contact inside app)
no way of following the ongoing walk
no clear identification that dog walker profile was verified
user have to input info about the dog every time when he wants to book appointment
Understanding user behaviors - user flow
After analyzing my competitors, I had a sense of what the user flow looks like. It was important for me that users can sense a familiarity. As I created a user flow I identified actions and decisions that the user must make in order to achieve their goal.
After signing in/ log in I created two versions of the flow for new users and old ones.
Link to flow: https://www.figma.com/file/o8TEWLbQRH7nNJ2yP1yTXH/?node-id=1482%3A10465
How can I solve users' pain points? Ideation phase
Me and all my colleagues started to brainstorm ideas on how we can help owners trust the walkers. We tried to figure out what can be a trust signal for users, what kind of info should we show on a dog walker profile.
Sketching solutions
After all this research and data that I have collected, now was a time to acctually cump up with ideas on what the product looks like.
I like to start sketching from Crazy 8’s exercise, because it allows me to put all of my ideas onto paper, evaluate them and combine them into the best solution.
Each idea was combined with the persona so that the product would solve the persona problems
Digital wireframes
Usability study
After creating hi-fi mockups and prototype I have tested my app with users. I asked participants of the study to complete the main flow (find doga walker and book the walk). After receiving feedback I iterated on my design.
Feedback
Overall I got great feedback. Users really like the app, they felt that it is simple to use and it’s modern looking. There were two problems that users had faced:
CTA buttons were visible on the screen after user scroll down - that had caused some confusion
Calendar screen layout was a bit overwhelming for users and they had problems navigating through it.
Addressing challenges
Final product
Outcome & Takeaways
During this project I have learned a lot about product design itself. I was able to really get the perspective that I have needed. My understanding of the design process really changed during this project. I also changed my attitude and realized that I can be myself when approaching problem solving.
The most important lesson for me was realizing how important research is and how they define the scope of your work.
I’m really happy that I had the opportunity to work with colleagues during sessions. We worked together to identify project goals, users needs and pain points. We brainstormed together, and it was amazing to see many different approaches on solving problems.
During the course we also have worked together on users flow to better understand the process of building it. We also did examples of wireframes together.
Working with the team showed me how amazing it is to work with all these ideas, how to pick the best ideas and how to explain your design decisions.
Thanks to working with mentor I have received a lot of helpful feedback and I could make better decisions.