Prototype for a mobile application that provides pet owners the ability to monitor their pet's health status remotely
Role & Contributions.
Project Lead; User Interviews, Ideation & Sketching, Wireframes, Prototyping, User Testing, Design Rationale
Background.
Urban living and the busyness of modern schedules present unique limitations for prospective pet owners. We designed a mobile application which would work with an interactive smart collar to send relevant feedback of pet activity to the owner and maximizing the health benefits of interaction between owner and pet. You can test the prototype here.
Discovery.
We conducted research in three areas:
1. Review of academic research related to benefits of human-animal interaction
2. Competitive analysis of existing pet care applications
3. Pet owner interviews of working professionals or students who are away from their pet's for more than 8 hours per day
Which resulted in these key findings:
1. Interaction that involves physical activity (walking or playing), as well as physical contact, (petting) proved to be the most beneficial for the owner
2. Owners experienced anxiety when leaving pet alone for extended periods of time
3. Owners were unsure of healthy levels of activity for their pet's breed and maturity level
4. There was often confusion and frustration related to who would carry out a particular pet care tasks in homes with more than one caretaker
Primary Persona: Elliot, a 31 year-old nurse, with a 6 month old, Husky.
Ideation.
My sketches focused primarily on interactive features and notifications directly from the collar
Using our findings as a basis for ideation, we settled on the following features for our design:
1. Health status tracking and remote updates to reduce owner anxiety
2. Customized recommendations for activity level and food intake based on pet's breed and maturity level to address owner's lack of knowledge and resources
3. Caretaker collaboration to reduce frustration and confusion around pet care in multi-caretaker households
Prototyping & User Testing.
Final workflow I created for the CollCare mobile app
The Evolution of the CollCare app
We employed a "test early and often" approach to our design and began with a lo-fidelity paper prototype that could be user tested and iterated upon easily. We tested our prototype with users
Early feedback indicated:
1. Wording of some interactive features was confusing
2. Social feature, originally thought to encourage more activity and interaction for owners by encouraging them to take more walks or schedule play dates, was met with a lot of resistance
We adjusted language and replaced the Social feature with a Rewards feature which gives owners badges for achieving daily activity goals that eventually translate to discounts on pet care products.
Then, using Sketch and Invision, a higher fidelity, interactive prototype was developed and user tested to refine and focus our designs by adding help text and refining data visualization concepts.
Finally, a visually designed prototype was produced which can be tested here:
Next Steps.
Mock-up of the interactive collar showing interactivity
Because CollCare was an academic project, we were limited to the design of the mobile application. However, the interactive collar was crucial to our overall concept of encouraging more interaction between the pet and owner as mobile devices are often barriers of face-to-face interaction. If we were to proceed with the project, the prototyping and testing of this collar would be the first priority. Additionally, the mobile application would need to be produced.
Team.
Anna Casey, Angela Rosette-Tavares, Yao Lu, Tongfang Sun
