This is a design assignment I did while looking for a job. I submitted the assignment in the form of a Medium story draft, so everything below this paragraph is exactly what I submitted.

Assignment Brief

What exactly I would be doing? → Design an app to help people adopt pets that match their lifestyle

Here is a super quick loom recording of me explaining the whole process and design

This was my first time recording a video for explaining a case study/assignment, excuse me for any messes. 😓

Research Run through

Design Run-through

Timeline

It took me nearly 3 and a half days to complete the assignment and the timeline was something like this: :

Goals

Primary Goal

• Let users browse and adopt pets that match their lifestyle
• Look for a way that this process can be made smooth by addition/removal of steps involved in a face to face process of adoption

Secondary Goal

• Find ways to make people stick around and use the app
• Adoption is usually a one-time process for most users and they would most probably delete the app or forget about its existence in their phone.

Note : Thought of a way for people to stick around, but haven’t designed that part of the app in this assignment.

Probable Users

• People who want to adopt pets (Target audience in this assignment)
• Shelters and pet-home owners
• Pet owners who want to put their pets for adoption

Constraints

• How to check if the user is authentic or not?
• What would and how to understand if the lifestyle of the user and the pet’s match?
• Never had a pet and don’t know what are the channels for adoption and requirements people look for

Research

Talking to users

Keeping in mind the time constraint, I decided to talk to a few friends who already have pets to know how they adopted or bought their pets. It was a questionnaire sort of approach for most of the people except a few.

Apparently, OLX (don’t remember exactly) used to be one of the mediums people come across pets for adoption. I couldn’t find any listings in OLX when I looked at it.

⭐ Learnings

• Going to a shelter and picking a dog is a unique and amazing experience. That is hard to be replicated through a phone.
• For verifying and interviewing potential users, have a video call with people from the shelter. Use this video call for the adopter to look at the pet as well.
• Recommended going to pick up a pet over home delivery.
• Adding a pet shop section to cater to the needs of adopted pets as well as retain users

Competitive Analysis

I did the competitive analysis with the main motive of understanding what’s the potential information a person is presented with before adopting a dog/pet.

⭐ Learnings

• Regular checks after adoption: Get the user to upload a photo every 6–8 weeks.
• Figured out categories for the shop: Food & Treats, Healthcare & Grooming (supplements incl), accessories
• Most of the apps served just as a gateway to put people in touch with shelters, with no other features like matching or pet supplies shops

Matching Lifestyles

This was one of the areas I was not sure how to proceed. I first went through a couple of adoption papers to figure out what might be a few questions that potential pet owners are asked about their lifestyle.

Then I went online to find how people match with their pets, similar to short online quizzes (Concern: Evidence on whether these actually work?)

Most of these questions were Agree/Disagree, Yes/No and choose between two options questions.

Each pet species have a different set of needs, so I decided to go with a dog and cat adoptions as two main offerings

Questions I decided to go ahead with

• Type of pet — Dog or Cat
• How often do you go on walks?
• How long might the dog be left alone in a day
• Do you have children?
• Do you own any pets? If yes, what type
• Select the traits applicable to you: Caring, tough, impatient, easy-going, rule-oriented, sensitive, logical, tolerant

⭐ Learnings

• Decided to go with just dogs and cats for this particular app, because each species is a completely different entity and would require more than just a 6 questions quiz to get their match. Going ahead with dogs and cats, and designing for adopting dogs section of the app.

User flow

You can view the miro board here. I decided to go ahead with designing the adoption flow.

Wireframes

I did the wireframe to get a better idea how my flow might look like. Once, I got that, I moved to design the screens.

Designing the screens

I designed a simple onboarding flow with screens describing the offerings of apps: Adoption and pet supplies shopping (secondary). I also stated that all shelters are verified to give a sense of assurance about the pets listed on the app.

After the onboarding flow, the user is asked a set of 6–7 questions based on which they are recommended pets in the matched section of the app. As mentioned in the previous sections, I went through a bunch of websites and adoption forms to know how exactly are pets matched with each other and all the questions here are based on that. Once, they have been answered, the user is asked to sign up for their account and view their matches.

The home section has a toggle on the top that lets the user switch between different types of pets listed on the app (i.e. cats and dogs). All the pets here are listed according to 3 categories: Matched pets, New listings and breeds. An additional category of favourites is created when the user likes/favourites any pet through an individual pet page.

In case, the user has not verified his identity and address yet (which is necessary for adoption), a top banner is fixed.

Every pet listing page provides all the major information that a potential adopter might want to know about (gathered these from the user interviews) as well as they can also browse through the pets photos and clips. Information provided in these pages is sex, age, breed, vaccinated or not, allergies etc, about the shelter and a brief description. The user has to click interested to proceed further in the adoption process.

When the user clicks interested for any pet listing, they schedule a video call with the shelter. This is done for the users to see the animal they are going to adopt as well as for the shelter to do a secondary verification (the first one being address and identity within the app). This is also for the shelter to know whether this would be the right pet owner(s) for the pet or not.

After the video call, the user is presented with an option to whether they want to adopt the pet or back out now. If it’s a yes from both adopter and shelter, the adoption has been approved. The user is provided with an option to either bring home the pet themselves or get the shelter to deliver it for them. Here, we would be recommending the users to bring the pet home since I noticed in the interviews that everyone considered going and seeing a pet before bringing it home as a great experience and that can’t be replaced by home delivery.

Every 6 weeks after adoption, the user is asked to upload the photo of the pet through a prompt as a way of post-adoption check-ins. This replaces the need for people from shelters to physically go to a person’s house and checking.

Haven’t designed these but possible solutions to the secondary goal: We can add a section that acts as a pet supplies shop or pet tracker. I am inclined to add the shop because that provides us with a way to monetize the app and users don’t need to look anywhere else but is a logistics nightmare.

Prototype

User going through the match flow and then going ahead to adopt a pet

Couldn’t embed the prototype here because of some issue with the medium, but can view it here

There are a lot of edge cases that I have not designed for this assignment, for example, what if a person backs out after saying yes, or what if they miss the scheduled call etc. This is done considering the time constraint as well as my decision to just focus on one particular flow.

What I could have done better? : I could have actually called pet shelters and tried to know their process. This struck me much later in the whole process.

The end

It was genuinely fun working on this assignment and to look at a bunch of pictures of dogs and cats online being the best part. Thanks for that. And I hope you too have a great time reading this.

Cheers

Actually, End :P

Thanks for scrolling through some 1500+ words and still sticking around. Let me if there is something(s) that I could have done better and would love to hear your feedback.

You can reach out to me on Twitter | Instagram and anuragkrishh.com is my portfolio (do check out my other case studies).