Pet Store UX/UI Mandate

While creating this project in collaboration with 4 others, we started by selecting a mandate that was of interest to us. This mandate was as follows…

"We are moving into a new format of store: a smaller, neighborhood focused store for pet lovers in large urban centers like New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco. As an add on to our app, we want to add a social element: a dating feature for pets to find play dates with other like-minded pets. We want you to design a pet match service for lonely animals in need of a playmate."

In order to begin developing this project we had to research the audience. We visited pet stores as well as dog parks to view the human to pet interactions. We also began understanding the human to human and pet to pet interactions. This observational research allowed us to understand the core need this mandate needed to address. As a team we should have spent more time in the stores observing and sketching, but we got what we needed to gain a greater understanding.

After researching we moved into the development of the stakeholders. After conversing and deciding on 3 stakeholders that were all different, we were able to create scenarios that would help us develop the mandate to reach a variety of target audiences. We worked as a team to identify many stakeholders and then narrowed down, and combined their personalities, interests, social status, etc. Through this process we understood how our experience had to impact a variety of audiences. We assigned 9 categories that each stakeholder would have specific needs that would have to be met.

Once we had each stakeholder figured out, and understood their needs we were able to reframe the mandate. We did this through learning “how might we,” statements. These were quite the learning curve and took a lengthy amount of time to complete. We had to take the time to understand them as a group, and then we were able to apply them logically. This led us to create a new mandate…

Based on our research; we came up with a solution to encourage dog owners to have community. This will include a custom built community made for dog owners, which will include: residential spaces, a large dog park, and a pet store, all inside the apartment complex.

Once we nailed down our mandate we could begin the ideation process. One of our group members was able to create a mockup design of the park so we could have a better understanding of what the space would look like. These ides were a combination of the group in result from crazy 8 sketching, bad ideas, and other time sketch activities. We came up with about 160 ideas in about 3 hours. I was not expecting to come up with the amount we did, but then it allowed us to have a lot of options further down the line.

This led us to begin solution design. We started by journey mapping our ideas. This was a learning curve for me as I had never gone through the whole customer journey before. Through trial and error I finally came up with the journey map below for the water area. I designed the Sniff trail and water area sections of the park, although there were 8 other sections being designed for. We had to learn to create cohesive design even when working apart from one another sometimes. This was a challenge but it helped us achieve a well designed solution, while learning about collaboration.

Continuing with more solution design we created a visual brand identity for 4 companies involved: our design agency, the apartment complex, the park, and the pet store inside the park. These each had aa unique identity that we came up with as a team. My designed portion was for the apartment complex. We had to learn color theory and the way people think and feel when looking at logos. We had other users come in to test the ideas and provide feedback as well which helped us redesign and improve our designs. This would impact the park design as well.

Once we had all of the visual identities set we moved into task analysis, and wire frames for the app. This was another learning curve as we were wanting to fully design at this stage. However we now know that there is concept testing involved to be able to fully flesh out the design with the user in mind. We had a guest stakeholder come to test the app where we discovered some issues within the usability. Some of the designed features were not clearly marked as easy to navigate. This led us to the need for more revisions. We were unable to make all the revisions for the sake of time, however I did get to design the Sniff Trail section of the app. This is the beginning prototype design I had come up with for my section. There were 5 other sections also being designed for by other members of the team.