Project Overview

A mobile app that connects dog owners to reputable local dog walkers. Finding

a trustworthy dog walker to care for your pet can be challenging when you rely on family and friends. Pooch aims to improve the dog walker search experience by connecting dog owners to licensed and certified dog walkers.

The Problem: Leaning on friends & family. Trusting strangers with their pet.

Finding a trustworthy sitter to walk and care for your dog can be difficult through an app. But relying on family and friends can be difficult to count on especially when most family members aren’t trained to meet your dog needs multiple times a week. 

Many dog walking apps like Happy Pupper, Paws and Spot allow users to write reviews on the services they provide and sitters can display badges on their profiles to help signal trust. But are these indicators really enough? Many dog owners still hesitate trusting their dog to a stranger. Pooch carefully screens all their candidates and only hires dog walkers and sitters who are fully trained, licensed with CPR, and have certified First Aid Training. A meet and greet is mandatory prior to scheduling their pet for any service.

My Role

• Project Manager

• User Research

• UX Strategy

• UI Branding

• Usability Testing

User Research

To gain insight into a dog owners misgivings and hesitations on using a dog walking app, I sent out a poll to 10 friends and acquaintances who owned dogs. Here’s what I found :

Most users prefer to lean on a specialty service with qualifications vs family and friends as availability was a huge issue. Some pets weren’t walked or let out at all. Exercise and socialization for the pet was also mentioned few times.

My primary objective was to reinforce the sitters qualifications to ease dog owners concerns with trusting a stranger. The goal was to alleviate the feeling

of risk immediately during the onboarding process. 

My secondary objective is to make sure the journey to find a dog walker, message and book would be seamless. 

After gathering all the information from the interviews and wrote all the key comments on post it notes. I was able to draw out these key insights.

Market Research

After my user research, I began my competitive analysis to empathize with my users to find if mentioned pain points were addressed by other dog walking apps.

Items I looked for:

• Depth of detail required for users to fill in profiles.

• Proof of verifications, badges and reviews.

• Process efficiency to book dog sitter/walker.

Happy Pupper Analysis : The first 3 screens you are introduced to the benefits you get with Happy Pupper. Although there is a link to skip these screens to get started, I would have liked to see a log in link too along with their logo. I noticed a quick pop up screen (screen 5) maybe a glitch? that quickly disappeared with screen 6. Turns out that is the landpage screen after you create your account. I liked how the CTA SIGNUP button changed color to LOGIN once you clicked on the bottom link Have an Account? Log in. I think I would place this text/link below the CTA and not at the bottom of the screen. In my research a friend talks about having a heart rate feature linked while her dog is on walk. This app tracks your pets steps, time, pace and distance. A welcome email was received offering a quick start guide how to use the app followed by another email 3 hours later how to train your dog to not pull on a leash. Can be useful having tips.

Pawsapp Analysis : This app partners you with insured dog walkers. Meet your dog walker and follow your dog with gps . The sign up/login screen feels busy and once in you set up your dogs profile with no skip screen link. But it does ask about your dog’s character. Are they friendly with other dogs? Are they microchipped? Do they pull on the lead? Are they aggressive? Do they have medical conditions? This portion can be handy for some but my users so far seem to prefer a quick journey to connect with a sitter. Then it jumps into the services offered in screen 10. You can jump into the walkers section but i'm not certain if a filter is applied. Each walker selected did not have an active reviews link.

Spot Analysis: After sign up you can create your pup profile or skip these to home screen with a map of available dog walkers in your area. Once you select a dog walker you are taken to their profile page and see ratings with a button to view feedback comments and repeat customers. No certification or badges found.

Based on some observations, I felt the items below important to implement:

• During onboarding placing an alert modal to allow app to share information about the user. This will allow automatic GPS location to view available sitters in their area without having to fill in a profile or enter their home address manually.

• During onboarding requesting the user to allow automatic notifications i.e. GPS real time dog walking, messages from your walker.

• Ability to “book” with a messaging function to schedule a meet up via the sitters profile, favourite sitters for rebooking or a message icon in the bottom nav.

• Ability to filter dog walkers according to ranking, training, most popular, newest and highest rated.

For the services screen, reinforcing trust factors into each service was an item i felt necessary to highlight for my users so they can feel at ease about booking with Pooch.

• For the dog services screen, I reinforced trust factors into each service offered.

• Dog Walking / Leashed block walks : Reinforcing dogs are all kept on leash.

• Potty Breaks / Dog lead and cuddled : We let your pet drive and reward!

• House Sitting / Free vet advice line 24/7 : All Pooch sitters have access to professional vets 24/7 while you are away should your pet need help.

• Doggy Daycare / Fun and secure play yards : Reiterating your pet will be secured in our play yards during our care.

• The Pooch Giveback / Animal welfare and care: Pooch is an organization committed in helping dog welfare by paying it forward.

Personas

Qualitative personas: Meet Teddy, Jade, and Maya.

User Flows

Based on my comparison of Happy Pupper, Paws, and Spot here's my first attempt at the onboarding flow keeping in with my users pain points while meeting the business and user goals.

After careful review, I found the walker profile list screen irrelevant to my user shown in the beginning of the flow as it wasn't generated from their location, plus as we shift towards a mobile first ecosystem, mobile number is a user's identity over the digital world. Applications and browsers over mobile are the way forward and so I dropped the email signup. Here's my improved onboarding sign up flow.

Continued from the homepage/dog profiles list you can select a sitter, contact directly or book via the booking calendar and pay making this version a straight forward to connect dog owners to available dog walkers within their area.

Wireframes

Below are my initial iterations for onboarding with the dog walker search flow and first meet up booking. Visual design are final iterations after user testing.

Visual Design

Mood board, Style guide and 
reusable ui components.

Usability Testing

Below are some reviewed screens from my user findings.

USER 1: "Onboarding screens not dark enough and CTA buttons side by side a bit small. User wanted to go back to beginning after reaching log in page so I added pagination. 
I darkened the overlay, and switched from oval design button to rectangle and placed under each other vs side by side. Also added logo. User 2 and 3 made no comment."

USER 2: User suggested I simplify the dog walker search screen. I removed the profile pic and left justified copy, removed tabs and simplified reviews with a star icon and added overall rating. Added a pin icon to 
show how far this sitter is located. Removed the play icon (sitter video introduction) as its included in the copy. Removed the gallery carousel.

 User 1 and 3 made no comment.

USER 3: Suggestion to add text to icons in the bottom nav. The user felt the icons were a little vague. User 1 also mentioned to add text to menu icons but user 2 made no comment.

Summary

The overall experience working on this Dog Walking project was great. I was able to thoroughly dissect various stages of my work and enjoyed working for the users, plus their feedback and stories gave me a larger scope of understanding into empathizing with them and their problems.

• Through the research phase, my users were able to get a better understanding of the experiences felt by the dog sitter side and found this to be insightful. 

• From the user feedback, I was able to discover new opportunities, which assisted the Pooch brand in targeting key areas.