Paw Prompt
End-to-end App for Pet Parents
Role: UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer, Brand Designer
Year: 2024
Background
As a pet owner, I understand the varied responsibilities, tasks, and significant costs involved in pet ownership. Managing these effectively can often be overwhelming.
My goal is to simplify and streamline how pet owners handle their tasks and expenses, empowering them to make informed spending decisions. Through research, I identified that a key challenge for pet owners lies in managing purchasing tasks while hunting for the best deals.
Goals
The goal is to develop a comprehensive application that helps pet owners seamlessly manage their pet care and finances. The app will provide personalized prompts when supplies are running low and share relevant offers and deals on their favorite items, ensuring everything is coordinated in one convenient place.
Problems
Pet care tasks can be multiple, varied and timely leading to disorganisation often causing owners to forget to complete tasks at ideals times and locations meaning they:
Buy products at full cost last minute.
Buy products purely because they are on offer (but aren’t their favourite or needed).
These behaviors often lead to frustration, highlighting the need for pet owners to better coordinate their restocking efforts with available deals and offers. Pet owners strive to provide the best products for their pets while minimizing costs. Knowing when to restock specific items allows them to align their purchases with the most favorable deals.
Don’t know their restocking needs when shopping (in person shoppers).
Spend significant time searching for deals an offers.
Impact
For this project, I validated the initial concept of a pet organizing tool. Based on research insights, I shifted the focus from budgeting to product discount coordination, developing an end-to-end pet reminder and discount app as a solo designer.
Research
Goals
My aim for the research was to understand what pet parent’s struggle with the most when it comes to sourcing, purchasing and budgeting for the items or services they require for their pets:
What challenges they experience when budgeting and completing tasks for their pets
What are their pet’s key needs and how does this influence what they buy
What would be most helpful to them organising their pet tasks
Methodologies
Competitive Research to see how other budgeting apps and pet apps work
User Interviews- talk to pet owners to better understand their needs and challenges
Journey Mapping- to hypothesise the actions, thoughts and feelings a user might journey through before, during and as a result of using the product
Usability Testing - test low fidelity and high fidelity wireframes with users
Competitive Research
I explored the intersection of pet well-being trackers and budgeting tools to better understand how to design a product that prioritises being ‘pet-first.’
My research focused on pet apps designed to log health data and remind users of essential tasks, as well as apps that track spending and assist with budgeting.
Most pet-focused apps are centered around health tracking, with budgeting either included as an add-on or entirely non-pet-specific.
I couldn’t find any apps that combine budgeting or task reminders with shopping rewards or discounts.
There is a clear gap in the market for a simple, pet-focused budgeting app that prioritises pet needs while helping users find items aligned with both their pets’ requirements and their budget.
User Research
Research Synopsis
User interviews revealed that while owners didn’t express a specific need for budgeting assistance, they still actively sought discounts on their favorite items.
The primary frustration centered around organising pet-related tasks. Many pet owners relied on their phones to set reminders for tasks like buying food or administering medication. However, they often spent significant time searching for the best deals on pet items.
Pet-related purchase information was scattered across multiple apps and platforms, making it difficult to coordinate purchases with available offers. As a result, owners either stockpiled items when a deal was available or paid full price out of urgency.
This insight led me to focus on helping users organize their restocking needs and connecting them with the best deals available when they need an item.
Pivot
User interviews revealed that while pet owners claimed they didn’t actively budget, they were still highly motivated to find good deals. They expressed a clear desire to save time and effort in organising pet-related tasks and locating the best offers without the hassle of endless online searching.
This feedback reinforced my decision to shift the focus toward helping pet owners streamline restocking by knowing when they need items and where to find the best deals.
Define
User Persona
By analyzing the user interview notes using affinity mapping, I developed a user persona that accurately represents the user group, highlighting their key needs and goals.
Customer Journey Map
After creating my persona, I aimed to understand Charley’s actions, thoughts, and feelings throughout her journey—from her current situation, to downloading and setting up the app, and ultimately receiving reminders and saving money.
Ideation
Feature Prioritisation
After identifying the most valuable solution for my users, I focused on determining the features that would best address their pain points. My goal was to create a simple, user-friendly app where the primary functions—reminders and product offers—were easily accessible. To ensure personalization, the onboarding process would include a detailed pet profile and inventory setup, allowing reminders to be tailored to each pet’s specific needs.
User Flows
To map out the steps and decisions Charley would take when navigating the app, I outlined four user flows. These flows clarified the necessary screens and how different parts of the app would interconnect.
Charley’s User Objective
"As a pet mom, I want to sign up for a new account and create multiple pet profiles. I want to receive reminders for their specific needs, like restocking food and medication, and be notified when my favorite brands are on offer and where I can buy them at a discount."
Charley opens the app for the first time and wants to set up a new account.
Sign Up Flow
Add a Pet Profile
Charley wants to finish setting up a pet profile she began earlier and set up a new pet profile.
Charley wants to get reminders for when the dog food and medication might run out, so she needs to tell the app how much her dog eats so it can work out when things run out.
Set up Inventory
Order
Charley wants to set a reminder manually so works through setting this up herself.
Charley receives a reminder that she soon might run out of the dog medication and is shown what merchant is selling it at the best price.
Add a Reminder
App Navigation
Drawing from Charley’s primary needs and goals, as well as insights from the user flows and priority features, I designed a straightforward app map. The key tasks were positioned for maximum accessibility, ensuring the entire app was intuitive and easy to navigate.
Low-Fi Wireframes
Low-fidelity wireframes enabled me to conduct early user testing with three pet owners, gathering valuable feedback on their expectations to guide further iterations. This round of testing confirmed that users expected the following:
The ability to set up a pet profile during initial account setup, accepting that onboarding might take slightly longer to optimize the app’s functionality.
A Home page featuring urgent reminders and top offers on their saved products.
Pop-up banner notifications for reminders and offers, so they wouldn’t have to remember to open the app.
A Supplies page that includes options to bookmark/save favorite products and log purchased items, allowing the app to predict usage rates and send timely reminders.
Additional feedback highlighted the need for adjustments to wording and flow to improve clarity and usability. The key iterations made after user testing included:
Set up flow to include a pet profile and inventory
Supplies page to include bookmark and purchased options
Create a Home page which includes top reminders and offers
Change ‘back’ button options to ‘skip’ for non essential information
UI Kit
Aligned with the brand values, I developed a cohesive brand kit and named the app Paw Prompt: a furry reminder to buy pets their treats. The name reflects the app’s main goals and resonates with the joy and playfulness that pet owners often associate with their pets.
To capture this spirit, I created a broad color palette that allows for playful combinations and incorporated illustrations with a fun, pet-centric theme.
Prototype and Test
High Fidelity Prototype
Usability Testing
I tested the initial prototype with five additional pet owners to evaluate whether the recent revisions improved the app's flow, making it more intuitive and user-friendly. This round of testing also focused on assessing how easily users could navigate and complete specific tasks.
Overall users felt the flows were simple, intuitive and easy to complete tasks.
The app structure was clear and easy to navigate.
The branding was pleasant to look at and ‘cute’.
Further iterations
Users didn't know why they were completing certain onboarding questions about their pet.
Fix: Provide brief prompts and explanations around the steps and what the app will do with the info/ why it's helpful to input.
Users were confused by the ‘Buy’ and ‘Purchased’ tabs when looking to set a new reminder.
Fix: Add a + button at the top of the reminder screen for easy access and clarify existing button to indicate its for a new reminder.
Users wanted to see product’s cost by weight in order to compare effectively.
Fix: Add cost per weight to product descriptions on Offers page.
Summary
Overall Thoughts
Throughout this project, I focused on listening to what the research revealed. Staying curious during user interviews was essential to uncover the actual problems pet owners faced, which differed from my initial assumptions.
Pivoting the app’s focus from budgeting to organisation required flexibility in my design approach. While users expressed no need for direct budgeting support, they still valued knowing about deals and offers alongside task reminders. I believe the final product successfully addresses the core issues of my user group, while leaving ample room for future development.
Future Development Opportunities
Broader Reminders: Expand reminders to include non-purchasing tasks, such as vet appointments or grooming schedules.
Enhanced Inventory: Add more detail to the inventory setup and purchase tracking, enabling the app to manage a wider range of products and scenarios.
Pet Advice and Local Promotions: Incorporate features for local businesses to promote pet-related services and share valuable pet care advice.
These enhancements provide exciting potential for the app to evolve further and meet additional user needs.
