I created the Prance dog walking app for my final project in Dribbble's Product Design Course. The end result was scaffolded by the completion of our weekly assignments and with the support from our team during mentor sessions. Enjoy viewing my process from my research to design to final product!

The first thing we worked on was identifying pain points through user research. User research included interviewing dog owners to figure out what their pain points were when using an app to find care for their pets. I interviewed 3 participants and these are the key things they said:

"I worry the walker will do the bare minimum and my dog will get lonely"

Matthew E. - Dog owner

"What I like about having someone stop by is that it gives me peace of mind knowing they are not going several hours without being walked."

Stephanie H. - Owner of 3 dogs

Another part of user research was auditing popular apps on the market to see if anything was missing that could be beneficial to dog owners.

After looking at app reviews and talking to friends and family, I generated a list of pain points I noticed:

To address these pain points, I brainstormed these potential solutions:

After brainstorming solutions, I created a user persona to bring my project to life and communicate my research findings in a empathetic way.

Then, I worked on my user flow for my app. Below is the first iteration of my flow. I initially wanted to create an app that both a dog walker and owner can use as an efficient way to provide options for them.

Next, I worked on initial iterations of wireframes for finding a dog walker, dog walker's profile page, a booking page, home page, and pet profile. I learned that this process was difficult for me since I've never tried thoroughly sketching out my design work before but I found the user flow to be helpful during this step.

When our course moved on to visual design I was very excited get the ball rolling. I was literally inspired by a tennis ball that I found at the dog park.

It was easily noticeable that the most popular dog walking apps use green as their primary color. However, I dove deep in research about color blindness in dogs because I was certain they could not see green. When I found out that dogs can only see the colors yellow and blue, I wanted my design to be inspired by this fact. I thought this bit of color intention would be fun to work with.

I also thought it was important to focus on onboarding, finding a walker, and the booking experience since my user research emphasized building trust with a new dog walker was important to users.

Below is my initial visual design based on my color inspiration:

After some feedback, certain points were made about my visual design that allowed me to see that it was not user friendly. Those points were:

1. The yellow color background was really bright and was hard on the eyes.

2. I used drop shadows on the text which made it difficult to read.

3. The headlines were too big and I should go smaller with the text size.

4. Certain components were too small and need to accommodate the average person's thumb size.

5. More space was needed between components.

I considered these points which inspired my latest iteration of my app. I decided to make the bright yellow a tertiary color and used dark blue as the primary color while also adjusting accordingly in response to the notes I received about my initial design. The end result is a cleaner design that I am proud of.

After working on my visual design, developing a prototype was the next step. Prototyping is important because a user needs to test the product and give feedback before sending the design to development to build the actual product.

I learned overall that:

All in all, everything I learned in Dribbble's Product Design Course was beneficial and has given me insight about my beliefs and abilities as a designer. My favorite lesson about learning product design is that growth and improvement is a great thing especially in our everchanging world.

Gracias!