about
Petlovin
For this personal project, I came up with an idea for an app that would connect animal shelters with potential pet adopters. The basic idea is that animal shelters can sign up on the platform and add pictures and info about pets that are currently in their shelter. Similarly, potential adopters can register and browse for a furry new best friend in their city.
For animal shelters, this would increase their reach and they might not even have to invest in a website anymore.
For people who are looking to adopt a pet, it’s way easier for them to search for one, without actually having to visit all the different sites of the pet shelters or even go to the shelters themselves.
As such, Petlovin could make the process for both parties much easier.
the process
Mindmapping & Market Research: I First wanted to see if there was already anything else out there similar to my idea. The only thing that I found was a US website that aggregated all shelter pets on their website. But I found nothing in Europe for instance. Then, I created a mindmap of how the flow of the app would look like. There would be two different users: The animal shelter and the potential pet adopter. So two different system flows would be needed. I also thought about if I wanted to add a direct messaging functionality in my app, to make communication easier.
User Research: I sent out a survey to my facebook connections and asked them some basic questions, such as if they wanted to adopt a pet in the future and if so, where they would get it.
Additionally, I conducted 2 interviews with people who had adopted a pet from a shelter and asked them what they thought of the process of searching for a pet in a shelter.
I also sent an email to a few animal shelters in The Netherlands and asked them a few questions on what their current pain points are in terms of finding potential pet adopters. And one of the pain points was marketing, more specifically, increasing their reach online.
Persona creation: Based on the data that I gathered from my user research, I created 3 persona profiles: 2 potential pet adopters and 1 for an animal shelter owner.
project details
Project: Petlovin – Mobile App
Type: Personal
Tools used: Potoshop, Balsamiq
Year: 2017
Wireframes
I made a list of screens that needed to be created and started creating the wireframes on Balsamiq.
Usability Testing
I conducted a usability test with two users, and I found that there were a few limitations with the initial wireframe design. For instance:
- When a user edits his or her profile after initial registration, they already set their preference for either a cat or dog in their profile as well as their location. When after this step they proceed to the search screen, they have to again input their preferences. It would be more efficient to have already their previously selected preferences inserted in the search input fields, so that the users don’t have to do it again
- CTA’s should be directly visible on a particular screen. Sometimes, the user is not aware that it is possible to scroll further down
- Animal Shelter registrars should also be able to register with Facebook or Google
- Instead of the search screen for the animal shelter interface, stats could be displayed, such as how many ‘saved’ pets there are etc.
Photoshop Prototype
