Design Brief
For this project, I tackled a design sprint challenge over the course of 5 days. My goal was to design a website for CityPups, a new startup looking to help people living in cities find and adopt the perfect dog. I was given some initial research such as personas, interview recordings, and some high level highlights from pet owners. The company goals for this sprint was to increase the adoption rate, happier owners, and to find better ‘forever’ homes for the dogs.
Role: UX Designer
Day 1
I began by familiarizing and digesting the research brief. After narrowing down some key points and things to focus on, I drafted an end-to-end user experience map.
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 1
The first day was spent analyzing the research and drafting an end-to-end user experience map.
Day 2
Day 2 was sketching day. Before I got started, I studied solutions from competitors and non-competitors designs that solve a similar problem. After this, I sketched designs using the ‘crazy 8s’ exercise and drew 8 possible solutions in 8 minutes equaling roughly 1 minute per sketch.
Day 3
Next was storyboarding. After deciding which of the 8 sketch solutions would work best, I used my user experience map to help create a storyboard to guide my prototype.
Day 4
This day was spent building my screens and prototype. For sake of ease and time, I built the screens and prototype all in Figma.
Day 5
Finally, it was time to test. I recruited 5 people, all of whom are dog owners who have adopted with one of them having adopted very recently. Here are some highlights of my findings.
Conclusion
Adopting a dog in a city presents unique challenges. The big frustrations can be boiled down to not having enough information so my solution was tackle that head on via filters, categories, icons, and including as much info as possible on profile pages. Realistically, an aggregator is only as good as it’s info sources and shelters typically don’t have a ton of info on the dogs. Designing something to account for this would be the next priority.