Dogify App : UX design case study on Indie dog adoption app

This is a step-by-step tour of how I designed an Indie dog adoption app

Context📄

While I was interning at PhonePe, I decided to pick a side project. Since my work at PhonePe was more of UX so I decided to do a project where I could focus on UI as well. I found an assignment by Smallcase about adopting pets which caught my eye. Also adopting a pet is something I wanna do in coming times(parents consent needed though).

Firstly I decided to break down the whole process into small steps, so it will not break the momentum and follow this design process.

But before moving further ahead first let’s define our goals, target users.

Goals🎯

• Help first-time adopters to find the right match based on their lifestyle by helping them browse several options that are fit for them.
• Help people in getting their questions on adoptions answered, try to provide information so that they can get enough context, and also provide some ways to solve their queries.

Target Users

• People who want to adopt pets(More focused on the first-time adopters).
• Shelters and pet-home owners.

Assumptions

• I had assumed that our target audience is tier 1 city people who are tech-savvy, pet lovers, and care about indie dogs adoptions.

Empathizing and Research🔍

As I never had a pet yet, so it was very important for me to understand problem space and user journeys and their motivation first so that I can do smooth ideations for solving the above problem.

Secondary Research💻

So I started my secondary research, by reading several blogs around the adoption of dogs and started watching youtube videos to understand the process of adoptions and current user journeys through Vlogs.

I started doing competitive analysis to understand how others are solving this problem.

Adoption vs Breeding

Health Tips For Your Newly Adopted Dog - Dharamsala Animal Rescue

The outcome of Secondary Research⛳

• Gained a basic understanding of problem space.
• I had collected data points/information that is necessary for users to know before adopting any dog, which I had shown later clubbing it with primary research.
• I got to know that there are several shelter homes in almost every city but they did not have a proper website so nobody knows about them, only a few shelter homes have websites like Dharamshala Animal Rescue.
• Some shelter homes are also selling pet products to generate some side revenue.

Primary research🗣

After getting a basic understanding of problem space and collecting some data points through secondary research. I want to know user journeys and experiences, pain points in detail.

So it’s was time to find some pet lovers who had adopted some dog earlier, after doing some DMs I found one friend who had adopted an Indie dog.

So I had a conversation with her and collected whole journeys and star points that I thought I should keep in mind in form of user stories.

The outcome of primary research⛳

• User quotes/User Stories this gave me detailed context when I was doing Ideations, and exact quotes also reduced the chances of misinterpretations.
• Collected more information(data points) that will be needed to show to the person who is adopting a dog(Extracted data points both secondary and primary research are shown below).
• Current journey :

1. Floated a message in my network that I want to adopt a dog, did not get any lead from there.
2. Started searching phone Nos of shelter homes near me.
3. Asked them for their WhatsApp no and they had sent me photos of pets and basic information about them like age and gender but sending each and every detail on Whatsapp for every pet was very difficult for them.
4. So I visited several shelter homes, and had a talk with different volunteers about my lifestyle and dog’s behavior, they will be suggesting dogs but many times there would be dogs that are not fit for us to adopt, and sometimes you won’t like them.

Ideations🤔

Now as I had understood the problem space now let’s start Ideations on what we can solve and how can we solve, but before that first I had defined the things that I thought were the major roadblocks and problems.

Major Problems/Roadblocks

1. How will be the implementation of matchmaking be going to happen?
2. How are we going to help people in getting their questions on adoptions answered?
3. How are we going to convey the health status of the dog, photos are not enough?
4. Is there any way for this app to make money for its smooth future operations? What will be the experience that I will be building(App or Websites)

Then I started brainstorming on each of them, wrote random ideas for each problem, and then started filtering them, this reduces the chances of leaving some unturned ideas behind.

Problem 1❓

Like this, I went ahead with approach one but the main problem was how to know about the lifestyle of a person. So after some googling, I found that there were some dog matchmaking quizzes on the internet, so I went ahead with that idea.

So I thought of asking those quick questions to the users so that we can know more about the user and show recommendations based on that.

So I wrote all the possible questions that I got from those quizzes

Then I filtered it by reading more blogs and prioritizing questions because we cannot ask too many questions this will create friction and can cause drop-offs. A blog that helped me to sort out

Pet Adoption Guide: How to find the best dog for your lifestyle

Finalized questions

• How often do you walk/run?
• The time you/your family can spare for the dog?
• Do you have any big room or yard for the dog?
• Do you have any children?
• Do you have any pets?

Problem 2❓

I went ahead with all these possible options to filter out the final options. Once I had a more clear idea of the overall experience I had iterated it later.

Problem 3❓

Problem 4❓

I believe every product should have a way to generate revenue. Even if they don’t make profit, atleast they should be able to run their servers from that money.

Problem 5❓

This is how I brainstormed on each and every problem and formed ideas to solve it, this made everything clear before jumping to actual designs, now it was time to jump on actual designing.

But before I had to make User flows so that I can have holistic(zoomed out) knowledge of how the app is going to move and can design according to that.

User flow

Wireframes📜

I started thinking of IA, started collecting data points and defining goals of each screen after I started making paper wireframes and started iterating on both wireframes, IA, and even data points so that every object that I was adding should have its justification of both it’s existence and also its location.

I was trying to make a type of dating experience because it is a kind of same experience for users getting a new member to your home and life so I had kept the design language playful, and the app will be similar to bumble and tinder.

But before that, I had one big question to solve was, Will I be showing the dogs in E-com layout(In Catalog/List), or interaction will be like dating apps(Swiping gestures)?

To understand this I had surfed through different blogs and articles to understand the psychology behind swiping gestures and finally found a great article on this.

The Psychology of Swiping in Apps

So that is why I finally decided to amalgamate an e-com and dating experience and went ahead making wireframes, shown below are some process snippets.

Visual Design🎨

After finalizing wireframes I went ahead working on visual designs, for each section and started iterating on that.

First I had to choose a design language that I am going to use, as this is a type of dating app so I had chosen the cute and playful design language, colors and icons will be picked accordingly.

I had removed all the unnecessary steps, like signup with email and long walkthrough to save the time of a user, the walkthrough will be autoloading just like Instagram stories. This will be faster and have a less cognitive load.

After login, the user has to answer 5–6 questions based on which we will be collecting the data of the user and will be giving him suggestions based those, I had finalized the question by going through pet matching questions and by reading blogs as mentioned earlier, Once they had given all the answers they will be taken to the home page.

I had iterated a lot on the IA of the home screen and added each and every piece of information very appropriately.

Data Points of Home Screen

• Location
• Profile
• One small fun fact or Quote at the top
• Best for you(recommended dogs)
• New Members
• Favorites. (When there is any)
• Recently viewed(When there is any)
• Understanding Adoption Videos
• Shelter homes
• Dogifying Stories

After this, I went ahead making a pet listing that will contain dog profiles, before making a dog profile. I had my data points for the dog’s profile from the research but the problem was that there was a lot of information to show over here so I decided to start dividing them into groups and start prioritizing based on those groups.

Had made the interaction & UI of the profile like a dating app’s profile, Had also added a video that will give an idea about the dog’s activities and health status.

Now I had to make user flow of how the adoption would work.

In the pet details section, first I thought to show other choices as well; but here we are not letting the user buy things. Only when a user is buying things we can nudge the users to add/buy similar items.

One way could have been showing merch store items to the user; but again that is only possible when the user has already adopted a dog. So I decided to drop that idea as well.

After completing this flow I went ahead making flows for solving queries of first-time pet owners on the platform, as I had already ideated earlier on this part now I just to had designed it.

I had added Understanding adoption videos to give a complete idea about how the adoption process works.

I had added Bite-sized reading blogs to read this will help the one who had adopted dogs, and this will also give more context to the user on how it will be like adopting a dog.

Finally added Popular questions and Talk with the expert feature.

So this is how I solved both the problems statements that were given to me. This is my personal favorite assignment now because this had given me a whole new perspective toward indie dogs and Animal care.

What could be done more if more time is given?

• More research on the pet supplies and essentials for merch store and could have made merch store also.
• More iterations for improving the design by taking regular user feedbacks.
• Think more about solving some post-adoption user flows and formalities through the app.
• Designing the after adoption of dog experience

It’s a Wrap🥳!

Thanks a lot for sticking around 1924 words, Means a lot to me:)