Bark!Beacon - Dog Walking App
My name is Shane Carlson. I'm one of the newest graduates in the Dribbble Product Design Course. This Dog Walking App case study was part of the curriculum. My focus for this case study was centered on UX Research, with some bonuses at the end. Thank you for your interest.
The Problem Statement 🤔
I am a dog/pet owner, trying to find someone to care for my furry baby when I leave for a trip. I don't want to ask or pay strangers or even professionals because I trust family and friends more, which makes me feel inclined NOT to use pet services.
The Goals 🎯
🎯 Conduct user research and interviews to discover solid insights that change how the team sees and understands the user's problem
🎯 Observe the user's problem and galvanize the ideal user state and how it should feel
My Role 💪
As the lead UX Researcher, my responsibilities were to:
• conduct a competitive analysis
• facilitate user research
• identify a method for finding user research candidates
• create quantitative and qualitative research questions
• architect the survey flow
• measure the success of survey outreach
• develop a user persona
• discover solid insights
• declare the ideal user state
User Research 😆
Survey Flow Architecture 🔗
I sent the following survey to as many as 23,000 individuals spanning 11 different communities that I’m a part of, plus one social media outlet, Nextdoor. In total, I received 35 responses with 221 fields of data.
Survey Metrics & Results
I used QR.io to create a short link so that I could track some additional demographic data and click-through rates. My total clicks, to date, are 110 with a clickthrough rate of about 0.4%...not so great. But given my reach isn’t calculated on impressions, I’m sure it’s much higher than that.
The great thing about my data set is the diversity of individuals I never would have been able to survey in from my inner circle.
User Insights 💡
Observation
I noticed from my research that most pet owners prefer family and friends to care for their pets versus hiring a professional.
Problem
Pet owners are reluctant to trust their pets with anyone outside their inner circle, BUT certain situations create the need, and they don’t know where to turn.
Insight
Pet owners treat their pets like kids/family members.
So what?
Pet owners can’t always utilize their inner circle. They can’t afford to. So we have to think about how we’ll connect them with people they learn to trust as much as their inner circle and help better connect them with their inner circle when not in a bind.
Ideal User State 👍
Problem
Pet owners are reluctant to trust their pets with anyone outside their inner circle, BUT certain situations create the need, and they don’t know where to turn.
Ideal state
Easy access to the inner circle to coordinate pet care when needed, with the added benefit of access to trusted professional care when in a pinch.
Metrics for success
% of individuals added to the inner circle and number of professionals saved.
NOTE:
The ideal state isn’t a proposed solution to the customer problem. The goal here is to focus on customer experience rather than features. This helps avoid encouraging the team to fall in love with a solution before they’ve had a chance to explore ideas.
Conclusion
Helping discover the job users hire a product or service for is the kind of value I LOVE to bring to a business relationship. Throughout this course, I've better learned how to utilize a solid research strategy to discover just that. I've also seen the importance of laying the foundation with solid discovery so that the rest of the product designing process can succeed (ideate, prototype, test & implement).
Even though I focused my case study on user research and data, I also wanted to showcase some of the visual aspects of the product design course. My plan is to create a follow-up use case showing these steps in more detail.
