CITY PUPS
Curating a dog adoption experience for city folk with city lifestyles.
Overview
City Pups was a modified Google Ventures design sprint focused on answering critical business questions and testing a realistic prototype with target customers within five days.
The Problem
When looking to adopt a dog, city dwellers have unique considerations like types of home, varying commutes, and access to outdoor spaces. With these constraints in mind, how might CityPups increase adoption rates and find happier forever homes for their dogs?
The Solution
Through provided user research it became clear that potential dog owners need a way to
1. visually sift through dogs available for adoption
2. match with adoptable dogs based on their preferences and constraints including personality and lifestyle
My Role
Sole UI/UX Designer
Day 1 — Map
Affinity Map
Based on the brief I received from City Pups, I found common threads among interviewees concerns and suggestions. This information is synthesized in the affinity map below.
Persona
City Pups provided a target user persona. Meet Ellie, a 27 year old NYC resident who is ready to adopt but wants to feel confident that she and her new dog will be a great fit for each other.
User Map
I crafted a User Map to define what an end-to-end experience might look like for someone like Ellie who is ready to find their pup but needs to feel confident that the match is an emotional connection and fits her lifestyle.
Day 2 — Sketch
Lightning Demonstrations
Day 2 began with lightning demonstrations: taking a look at great solutions from a range of companies that solve a problem similar to that of City Pups.
Naturally, I took a look at dog adoption sites: Adopt-A-Pet and Petfinder.
Lastly, I explored other sites that seek to pair users with the perfect forever match: car sales websites. I chose Carvana, whose matching quiz did an excellent job in giving users flexibility in choosing their preferences.
Crazy 8’s Exercise
I then sketched eight City Pups results screens using the Crazy 8’s brainstorming method. This required me to sketch out eight ideas in eight minutes. This helps to push beyond initial ideas and generate a variety of solutions to the problem. I combined design elements from the other sites I had compared to decide the best placement for important elements of the screens dog profiles and filter options.
Three Panel Solution Sketch
The solution sketch demonstrates the primary flow of the City Pups adoption process which provides the user with two options:
- Search for dogs by location with the option to personalize search filters, or
- Take a quiz to gauge user’s lifestyle and personality in order to find their perfect match
This solution provides users with the opportunity to land on the site and start browsing immediately, deciding on filters and preferences along the way (research revealed that most users expected this experience upon entering a dog adoption site), or they can start straight away with a personality and lifestyle quiz that will narrow down results quickly.
Day 3 — Decisions
Fresh from finishing my sketches in Day 2, I created a storyboard of the main red route for City Pups: the personalized match quiz.
Check out the full 8 panel storyboard flow here.
This exercise expanded on the three-panel sketch of the critical screens for our solution. Now, an end-to-end flow was visualized and ready to take forward into a clickable prototype.
Day 4- Prototyping
I started prototyping using the rich purple of the City Pups logo as the primary brand color. The perfect match quiz is the first thing the user sees, as is done by PetFinder, but the option to scroll down and peruse available dogs near the user is still easily accessible.
The matching quiz has a minimalist styling with buttons that turn a lighter shade of the primary brand color when selected.
The screen below, like much of the flow, was modeled directly from the sketched storyboard on Day 3.
The dog profile page features an easy to find button to message the adoption center and inquire about your perfect match.
Day 5- Testing
On the last day, I interviewed target users of City Pups, some of whom worked within the dog industry, but all of whom were dog owners and lived in a city.
The users were instructed to perform three tasks:
- Complete the “perfect match” quiz.
- Explore a dog’s profile that matches the criteria.
- Inquire about the dog through City Pups messenger.
Overall, users responded positively to using the site while also providing helpful suggestions as to what could make City Pups even better.
Positive Quotes
Users had the following positive remarks regarding their experience using City Pups to find a pup and contact the adoption center:
Usability Issues
The following usability issues were uncovered:
There were some missing elements that caused some major frustrations for users. There were no options to retake the quiz and no back buttons along each screen of the quiz.
Secondly, there was no display of how many steps there were in the matching quiz, which goes against Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Heuristic #1, visibility of system status. These would be major faults if left unchanged.
Other inconsistencies were found in the design, particularly button and font sizes that need adjustments.
Lastly, minor design additions could make the matching quiz more delightful for users to click through- particularly images to go along with the text and more specific categorical differentiations.
Check out the new and improved prototype with all user feedback and visual design adjustments integrated.
Conclusion
The design sprint was successful in answering the critical questions needed to move City Pups from researched idea to workable design. In the end, the prototype and usability testing garnered positive sentiments with actionable suggestions that would make the experience even more delightful.
Finding the right dog to adopt is a big decision. Through empathy, thoughtful design and user testing, City Pups fills the need to feel confident in this decision while also making it an enjoyable journey.
