Introduction

For a lot of us, life can be very chaotic. From work and meetings to daily tasks at home and social gatherings, our schedules are full of activities that end up making it quite hard to find the time to take your lovely dog for a walk. 

In these busy times, not everyone can do everything alone, and dog walking services come as a good option and solution for those who sometimes (or on a regular basis) need help caring for or walking their dogs.

With this challenge in mind, and as part of my Product Design learning journey, I was tasked with creating a service to connect dog owners with dog walkers while exploring ways to encourage the dog owner to trust their dogs will be in safe hands.

Problem Statement

How to Connect & Build Trust Between Strangers?

Pets are part of our families, and as such leaving them in the hands of a stranger, even if it’s for a short walk around the block, it’s a tough ask.

Most people would prefer to ask someone they trust, like friends or family, to look after their dog before trying a service or an app. So, how can we create a reliable experience that can help connect two strangers for a good reason?

To grasp a better idea of who the user is, I participated on a brainstorming session on one of our mentor meetings. These ideas helped me realized the extent a dog walking app could have and how it could help solve some of the problems outlined below.

Research

User Research

Understanding What Dog Owners Value More When Looking for Caretakers

To find out the best approach on bringing together dog owners and dog walkers, I conducted 1-on-1 user interviews with five dog parents. 

I asked them some questions to see how likely they were to use a dog walking service, what would be the most important things they would look at on a dog walker and if they have any experience with similar apps.

Market Research

Understanding the Competitors & the Way of Dog Walking Apps

My research began by looking at some existing dog walking apps to identify what makes them different, the services they offer, and what I can learn from them to improve the experience when creating my solution. 

By doing this, I was able to put myself in the dog owner’s shoes to see how intuitive the process of finding a dog walker can be and what criteria would be important to provide right away to make the searching process easier.

Defining the Problem

Persona

Meet Lisa & Balto

Armed with my user and market research, I developed a user persona to help me understand the varied needs of a dog owner in need of a dog walker.

User Flow

Creating the Blueprint for a Consistent & Intuitive Experience

While competitors like Rover and Wag! offer a variety of services, I decided to restrict the available services to dog walking and pet sitting, focusing mostly on finding a dog walker for the user flow and made sure to include design patterns on the search criteria to speed up the process once the user is in the app.

Solution Ideation

Wireframes

Bringing the User Flow to Life

Before I jump to start working on a more polish digital version, I like to begin my ideation process on paper or very rough sketches. Based on my initial research and keeping in mind my persona, I started to sketch some ideas about how the initial encounter with the app would look like and how the dog walker search process could be.

Once I had a better idea of what elements I should focus on, I moved my sketches to a digital environment using Figma and created low fidelity wireframes based on the versions I considered had more potential. 

Transparency, trust and communication were the key focus for my ideation, to provide a solution for Lisa’s pain points.

First version: Provide as much information as possible without overwhelming the user.

While working on some screens for the first version, I played with the idea of searching only based on the user location while still displaying the list view for the results. 

If location is so important to Lisa, maybe a more dynamic approach on the results page was in order.

Second version: Searching dog walkers based on user location with options to refine the search.

After taking another look at my wireframes, a third option came to mind, one that could encompass all the elements necessary to make the experience intuitive for my persona. 

And once the new layout was in place, it was a matter of adding some life into the wireframes.

Visual Designs

Creating the Brand & Aesthetic of Woofker

Based on the market research, I know I wanted to use a very distinctive color palette that would be inviting, welcoming and fun as well as different from the common styles.

So, using a warmer scheme (yellow, red and purple) and combining them with fun and playful illustrations… Voilà! Woofker friendly and welcoming experience starts to emerge, inviting the user to be curious about what comes next.

All of these elements come together on a clean and sleek design that focuses on providing the dog walker’s information most vital for the dog owners. 

And to keep the style consistent throughout the app, creating a cohesive design system will help when prototyping and developing a possible phase 2 of the project.

Prototyping + Test

Meet Woofker, a Friendly Dog Walking App

For my prototype, I wanted to focus on designing a couple of key flows—start searching, select specific criteria to narrow down options, and select a dog walker that fits the best criteria.

Due to time constraints, I narrowed the usability test to specific steps to see if the users were able to navigate the main pages and get the expected results. 

It was an encouraging experience to see all the test users completing their tasks, and their feedback helped me make iterations based on the testing results.

A little peek to the Prototype in Figma.

Lessons Learned

It was a very enlightening and fun experience to create Woofker, from defining the problem based on the research, to creating engaging prototypes that almost reflect what the final product could be, it was an enjoyable process. 

My biggest takeaway from this project was learning to understand the user and keeping in mind my persona throughout the process. It helps to ground the whole process and to avoid diverting from the main goal of the app.

Getting some early feedback helped me open up my mind to different solutions and try different approaches compared to the most common layout for dog walking apps. 

Finding ways to improve the design patterns that are already well-known in the industry is key to make a new dog walking app competitive in the market.

Possible next steps would be to continue expanding the design, to explore more in depth the login/sign up flow, especially when it comes to scheduling an event with the dog walker before the user is signed in, so they can come back to this step after they register.