Role: User Research, Ideation, Sketching & Wireframing, Branding, UI Design, User Testing, Iteration
Tools Used: Sketch & InVision
Project Length: 10 weeks
Platform: iOS
Fish&Bone serves as a platform that connects pet service providers to pet owners, including pet boarding, house sitting, doggy daycare and dog walking. Additionally, Fish&Bone builds social connections for the owners and their pets by encouraging and facilitating involvement in the pet communities around them.
🚨 Problem Space
Nowadays pet owners are having a hard time balancing their work and personal lives which give them very little time to take care of their pets.
🤔 Hypothesis
I believe that pet owners still want to travel and live their lives, it is the guilt factor that makes it less enjoyable for them. I’ll know it’s true when pet owners are able to find services that are catered to them and their pet’s needs.
👉🏼 Approach
With a clear defined question in mind, I began my secondary research to get a better understanding of the problem before I start on the user interviews. Then I prepared a list of assumptions and developed an interview guide with targeted questions.
New York Post interviewed 2000 pet owners in America
I then conducted interviews with five pet owners to gather information about their day-to-day interactions with their pets, and to gain better insights from their experience with the problem space.
🔑 Key Interview Findings
“I am having a hard time going on trips with family because someone has to stay behind to look after the pet.”
“I won’t travel out of town for more than a week.”
Would feel guilty leaving them at home alone when they are required to do overtime at work.
Often miss out on social gathering with friends to stay home with their pet.
💁🏻♀️ Persona Development
Meet Aiko, as a PR Manager of a media company, she is required to travel several times a month to different office locations. She will need someone to take care of Bulga (her French Bulldog) when she goes on a business trip and don’t want to always depend on friends and neighbour. She wants to find somewhere and someone she can depend on when a sudden trip happens.
Creating an experience map 🗺 helped to identify Aiko's journey and provided a bigger picture for design opportunities.
📖 User Stories and Core Epics
Based on the areas of opportunities, I brainstormed possible user stories to further explore Aiko's needs and design something that will truly help her. Next, I grouped the user stories by core and secondary epics which mapped out the final direction of the product I designed.
💁🏻♀️ Aiko wants to:
Find pet services that are tailored to her and Bulga’s needs.
Get the availability, pricing and review at a glance.
Able to get to know a little more about the pet service providers before contacting them.
Communicate easily with the pet service providers.
✔️ Core Task Flow
💡 Ideation
Sketching to Wireframe
📱 Usability Testing
Starting from the initial sketches, I conducted two rounds of user testings to validate my design decisions and also pin point the areas that do not work. Iterations are carried out after each round of user testing.
👓 High Fidelity
Final Version
⏯ Interactive Prototype
🎨 Style Guide
Brand Identity
The Ultimate Guide to Color Psychology says: “The color orange is particularly bright and denotes playfulness and social interaction. The color also gives off the vibe of comfort and warmth.” This is why I was inspired to use the color orange because I want to give users a warm welcome when they interact with the brand.
📈 Responsive Marketing Website
💻 Desktop
📱 Mobile
🖥 Desktop Web App
Users are always on-the-go (mobile) or at work (desktop) when they need to look for pet services ahead of time to plan out their schedules, so a desktop web application could provide an equally pain-alleviating experience.
Future Consideration:
My vision is to expand the platform further by integrating task flows such as connecting “Pet Hotels” and create a “Pet Community” for my users . My focus is to create an all-encompassing product that will link pet owner to pet owner.
Oh and thank you for taking your time to go through my case study, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!