Introduction
In this article i would like to share with you my experience with Animal ID.
Animal ID is platform where you can keep your pet’s most important information and your contact details up-to-date on QR passport. If you have lost your pet, finder can just scan the QR with a smartphone, after you will receive an e-mail with GPS location of the scanning place. But product is struggling with one but really crucial problem, it has really low conversion and user experience at all. New users signs up and returns only in case they lost their pet.
So here we go with challenge How to Enhance the User Experience, we need to find benefits for users to increase time using app and not only when pet’s lost.
The process:
Research
Following the IDEO model for the human-centered design, we started the process with usability testing and ended with validation. This process provided me with a roadmap and a solid foundation to base our design solutions on users findings.
Interviewing
So after understanding the challenge we started seeking participants with pets for in-depth interview who would be useful for us to gain an empathic understanding of the problem we tried to solve.
In-depth interviews are a qualitative data collection method that allows for the collection of a large amount of information about the behavior, attitude and perception of the interviewees.
So after sharing assumption, compiled them into one list, and then chose the most important ones (with the team) for testing. Each assumption requires its own specific questions and testing methods.
Hypothesis, research questions and guieds
I interviewed 5 participants who helped me to gain significant information for future research. Collected information from records, wrote down insights and analysed it.
Generation ideas
Using gained information from interviews we moved to Value proposition methodology. Process like this helped to get to “minimum viable clarity,” which can be whittled down into a one-sentence value proposition. Also hepled us to see why a customer would choose product.
- 5/5 complained about finding information about health, feeding or tips at all for pets.
- 3/5 can definitely trust only to vets, or well-experienced friends.
- 2/5 adore reading or watching about others pet.
- 1/5 needed to be in touch with vet.
So that they didn’t trust information just from google. We decided that relevant for users to read the information as reliable and verified as possible, form specialists(vet), because they’re worried about their pets.
Sketches
This was the first step to help me outline the app and visually imagine it.
I started sketching out solutions on paper to give freedom to my flow of thought and not be constrained by details. My main objective was to create an easy flow and a clearer way for users.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
This visual guide represents the skeletal framework of the app. It helped me arrange the interface elements while I focused on the functionality rather than what it looks like. Moreover, the simplicity of wireframes allows me to quickly test ideas without diving into the details.
Prototyping
Prototypes are one of the most important steps in the design process, yet prototyping is still confusing for some designers and project teams but for me its the most beneficial part.
After sketching on paper I turned my ideas into high fidelity screens using Figma, then created a clickable prototype to validate my solutions.
I’ve tested 7 participants.
After tests:
- Users had no difficulty using library in app
- Found and fixed some mistakes
- Validated convenient button layout
Conclusion
What did I learn?
Designing for Animal ID has been a challenging and rewarding journey. It was clear from the onset that the major challenge will be to make pet owners interested in something that increase value of application. I understood the needs of the users through the survey and conversations. I faced the challenge of creating an engaging app both from the user experience perspective and the visual perspective.
What did I use?
- in-depth interviews
- brain storm with team
- value proposition methodology
- prototyping in Figma
I believe we shouldn’t be satisfied with the existing solutions without questioning them and trying to constantly improve them even if we fail many times during this process.
Designing the app has been a challenging and rewarding journey.
Through this project, I realized how important the research stage is. Users can tell you which direction your product should go and what you are missing. Only after in-depth interviews did I understand what was important to users and how to make this application truly valuable for them. I realized that by skipping the research phase, one could end up with a product that no one needs.
Thank you!
