The CityPups team wanted to launch a new website for dog adoption that catered to city residents because current dog adoption sites were missing what these potential dog owners needed to help them make important adoption decisions. City residents need to know more specifically about the dog's needs and behavior because they have more constraints such as space and time to deal with. Additionally because cities are often busy, these soon to be owners need to know what their dog is able to interact with in a friendly manner. Thus, a reasonable solution for potential dog owners in cities would help these users more easily adopt a dog and this would give CityPups an advantage in the current dog adoption market.
See PrototypeDue to the time constraints, we decided to run a week-long modified Google Ventures (GV) design sprint to quickly work through the 5 stages of design thinking (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test) in order to rapidly develop and test a high-fidelity prototype of a possible solution to our problem.
In order to cater the dog adoption website to city residents the filters on the website were adjusted to include some of the specific information city owners needed to know such as what animals and people their dog is good interacting with. Additionally more information was added to the dog's profile to help prospective owners determine if the dog is a good fit for their family.
CityPups is a start-up working on providing a more comprehensive dog adoption screening process for people living in cities who want to adopt a dog. Since cities present unique challenges for soon-to-be dog owners related to living spaces, work schedules, and interactions with other people and animals, city-dwelling residents want to have detailed information about practical aspects of the dog’s care as well as the personality of the dog to ensure it will be a good fit for them and their lifestyle. While the emotional connection with a dog is still extremely important to these prospective dog owners, they also want to be able to provide the right care for the dog as well and, thus, they need to consider other factors beyond personality that are not always listed on adoption websites.
In order to quickly make sense of all the exploratory research the team had already gathered (since I did not actively participate in this research myself) I created an affinity map to help me find the common themes about what city owners wanted to know about a dog before adopting it.
As I was planning out what the main website flow was going to look like I used my affinity map to compare and contrast the information I saw from the competition vs. the information the city adopters wanted. I then brainstormed a way to add in the additional information our users wanted.
Next to quickly spark some good ideas for the design of the CityPups website I conducted Lightning Demos to look deeper at what the competitors of CityPups were doing well. Although I saw a lot I could incorporate from the dog adoption competitors of Petfinder and AdoptaPet, I personally did not like how these websites were applying their filters. Based on my previous knowledge of the problem space and my map of the end to end user experience, I knew that the filters and the amount and kind of information provided on the dogs was going to be vitally important to CityPups helping our users find a dog that fit their needs in a city. Thus, I chose to look at some unrelated sites that were handling filters in another way to get some better ideas of how to possibly differentiate this critical aspect of the website from what the direct competition was doing.
After all, as Jim Jarmusch, an American Film Director, so fittingly put it:
After conducting the Lightning Demos, it was obvious to me that the filter screen would be the most crucial in differentiating CityPups from the competition. I used the Crazy 8’s Method to quickly come up with 8 possible variations of what this filter screen might look like.
After conducting the Crazy 8’s Method I took a look at all the screens I had made and decided on the right middle screen (pictured above) because it was the least obtrusive to the user’s flow while still allowing them to accomplish their goal of narrowing down which dog was right for them. I then made a mini storyboard to get a snapshot of how this screen might fit into the larger flow of adopting a dog.
I chose to have an unconventional distance filter along the top based on inspiration from Airbnb having their main filter along the top and because I thought that if the user had a lot of filters and could not find a dog super close by to them they may want to adjust the distance multiple times to get more results. In this scenario instead of going through the filters again the user could simply change the distance as needed on the top of the page.
Continuing on from yesterday’s ideas I began to incorporate the filter solution into a full storyboard to quickly sketch my ideas for what the site as a whole would look like and how the users would interact with it. I used my mapping of the end to end user experience from day 1 to guide me through what screens and steps I still needed to draw out. I once again took inspiration from what the competitors’ websites were doing and then I thought about how I would alter the designs for CityPup’s specific audience. After I was finished with the website steps I added some preliminary and post steps that would occur outside the CityPups’ website’s context to get a more complete picture of the users' journeys.
Before we began building the site I needed something that could act like the real website and allow me to test out my solution with prospective users. This prototype would allow me to work out the kinks before the website was built (and save money because fixing mistakes on the real website would be less cost effective).
Although my prototype was fairly simple, day 4 actually took me around three days to complete because I was working alone (usually a whole team takes one day to complete this step). I was feeling rushed so I ended up creating work that was not up to company standards, but I did not realize this until I received a critique part way through making my prototype from a more senior designer. I think she realized that the time crunch was making my work subpar, so she gave me some feedback and then offered me the following advice: in this case do not forgo quality in favor of taking less time to just make something. I ended up taking longer than I was planning on this step, but I think the improvement over the frenzied draft warranted the extra time.
Although my original sketches had a search bar along with the filters, I decided to leave the search bar out for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and add this feature in later. Note: These screens were slightly modified after using testing to improve the flow and overall aesthetics of the website.
After I finished making the first iteration of the prototype it was time to conduct some remote usability tests to learn whether this solution for the main flow of CityPups was a viable solution that could aid city residents in finding their dream pup. I was able to recruit 6 participants who lived in cities that were interested in animal adoption (with a focus on dog adoption).
After I found the correct users to test with, I wrote a script consisting of content questions, a task to test the website’s main flow, and follow-up questions about the website. The context questions gave me more information about the users and allowed me to continue to gather insight as to what city residents wanted from a dog adoption site. The main flow task and follow-up questions gave me concrete ways to improve the website prototype in future iterations as well as reinforcing what was working well with the current design solution.
I was hoping to get lots of feedback on the filters page (which helps the users narrow down which dog would be a good match for them) and the pet info page (which would help users decide to either inquire more about the dog or fill out an adoption form).
After the usability tests were finished, I made an Google sheets page to track the main usability issues or comments about the prototype the users had. I was surprised by how few issues in the prototype there were considering the limited time I had to work on making the prototype. Overall though the solution seemed like a viable option with some minor tweaks.
See PrototypeThis design sprint consisted of days dedicated to understanding the problem, sketching solutions, storyboarding, prototyping, and lastly user testing. Considering that at the beginning of the week I began with nothing but preliminary research and by the end of the week I had tested a prototype of the main flow of CityPups with 6 users I would say this was time well spent. Although there are still some minor fixes to be made to the prototype, the five day design sprint helped kickstart the building of the CityPups’ website in a short amount of time and was very effective in validating a proposed solution before the team started to build that solution.
Before submitting it to the stakeholders I went ahead and fixed some of the main issues with the prototype. Now I can get feedback directly from my team and hopefully this design will serve as a springboard for designing and then launching this product out into the world.
