Design Challenge: Helping pets find their forever home (Part 1).

This week’s design challenge is from Productdesigninterview.com and here is the prompt:

Millions of animals are currently in shelters and foster homes awaiting adoption. Design an experience that will help connect people looking for a new pet with the right companion for them. Help an adopter find a pet which matches their lifestyle, considering factors including breed, gender, age, temperament, and health status.

I’m going to break this design challenge into two parts and follow the following design process:

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test (I might skip this step due to time constraints / limited resources).

For the first part I’m going to focus on steps 1 and 2, Empathize and Define.

EMPATHIZE:

Who is my user? What matters most to them?
After doing some research, I found the following information on those who have adopted from shelter’s in 2019:

1. Single Men/Women between the ages of 23–30
2. Families with at least one child
3. Newly weds

60% of people who went to a shelter adopted a dog, so for the purpose of this challenge, I’ll be focusing on the process of adopting a dog, but will be sure to make the option available to search for other types of pets such as birds, cats, and reptiles.

After defining who my users would be, I looked into reasons why those don’t adopt from shelters. Here are common reasons why most people chose to buy pets from a breeder or a shop rather than a shelter:

• Most dogs in shelters are older and many believe that because of their age, they will be harder to train
• Dogs in shelters are unhealthy
• Dogs in shelters are more aggressive and have behavioral issues

I decided to do some digging to see if I can find anything that would “debunk” these thoughts and found that puppies are harder to train. An older dog, if trained properly, will already be potty trained, know basic commands, and will show their true personality. Whereas puppies you need to potty train, teach all basic commands, and often times go through personality changes (which is why they end up in a shelter). In addition, dogs in shelter’s go through routine medical checks, meaning, they are just as healthy as a puppy that comes from a breeder (if not — healthier).

I also found that many canine behavioralists found that dogs in shelters are no more aggressive than pure bred puppies. Dogs in shelters are socialized with other dogs / humans so they can gain this exposure. Shelter’s will also disclose if a dog is unable to socialize well with other dogs and provide reasons why (if they know about their history) and give advice on how to go about navigating this, if the potential adopters are interested in adopting the dog. You can also opt out of adopting that dog if you find that task is too much for you to be able to handle. When it comes to buying a dog from a breeder or shop, you don’t know about their background, and it’s up to you to do the socializing, so if you don’t properly socialize your dog, it could end up aggressive. Another plus I found to shelters vs Breeders/shops is that adopting from a shelter is significantly cheaper. Adopting from a shelter includes medical costs where buying from a breeder does not. Not to mention breeders typically charge a minimum of 1K, depending on the breed, whereas shelters are typically $30–50, and sometimes you can even adopt a dog for free!

Based on all of this, I found that things that matter most to our users include a pet that fits their lifestyle, knowing medical history of the animal is important, alongside with knowing as much about their background history (i.e. why they were brought to a shelter).

DEFINE

What are their needs?

With all of the information I found during research, I decided to focus on these three goals:

1. Help people find a pet that fits their lifestyle perfectly
2. Debunk myths/thoughts that are associated with adopting a dog / pet from a shelter by highlighting advantages of adopting from a shelter

From here, I made a list of necessary features for the app:

1. Option to filter by certain criteria
2. Notifications section where they can get alerts/updates on pets that maybe perfect for them
3. Onboarding section so they can get familiar with the app and feel comfortable using it
4. An option to “favorite” pets or save them to a list
5. Ability to schedule a time to meet them via the app and fill out questionnaires that may be required from the shelter during this process

With this and the goals in mind, I did a round of sketching to help me bring this to life, then was able to create high fidelity wireframes, which is included in the “ideate” section of this challenge, which I’ll cover next week.