The Problem
Pet adoption is a complex area with numerous challenges, including an overabundance of adoptable animals, a limited number of potential adopters, and difficulties for individuals in selecting pets that align with their lifestyles. While researching this expansive problem space, our team decided to focus on the problem statement: How might we facilitate successful pet adoptions for young adult first time pet adopters?
Our Solution
In order to address these issues, we designed Pawnder, which aims to streamline the pet adoption process, making it easier for prospective adopters to find the perfect companion. Users provide Pawnder with some information about their lifestyle, and Pawnder finds matching adoptable pets for them. After swiping right on desired pets, Pawnder assists in selecting the top three for users to meet at shelters.
Quick Links: Prototype | Observations | Semi-Structured Interviews |Hierarchical Task Analysis| Moderated User Testing
Some images from our final prototype:
Foundational Research
Observations
We began our research process by visiting two shelters in the Atlanta area, where we took pictures and notes. Afterwards, we identified some of our major takeaways about the adoption space.
- Shelters are overwhelming from a sensory perspective, as they are bright, loud, and smelly.
- Information about pets was often unavailable, unclear, or inconsistently presented.
- There are too many pets in many shelter environments for potential adopters to consider all, or even most of them.
Semi-Structured Interviews
We continued our research by conducting semi-structured interviews with seven individuals, six of whom had adopted pets and one who had purchased a pet from a breeder. We wanted to understand how and why our interviewees adopted their pets to thoroughly understand the process of adoption, as well as how pets integrated into their new homes.
Our major takeaways from our interviews were:
- Adopters learned about taking care of animals in various ways — through the internet, through speaking with friends and family, through shelter material, and through “fostering to adopt”, shelter programs that allow potential adopters to foster animals prior to adopting them permanently.
- Many adopters had some frustrations with shelters during the process of adoption, finding shelter websites lacking critical information and being clunky to use. Adopters found the experience of being in the shelter itself confusing, and struggled to communicate with the shelter.
- Even if adopters were flexible on what pet they wanted, they had preferences about the animal they were going to adopt. Being cute was important to adopters, and many adopters expressed opinions about the ideal age for a new pet, although age preferences varied from puppy to a senior animal.
- Adopters had a variety of reasons for choosing to get an animal in the first place. Emotional connection and support was the most common reason to adopt, but adopters also cited nostalgia for previous pets, seeing pictures of friends’ pets, and needing a good reason to stay home and study as motivating factors for adoption.
- There were a variety of reasons individuals chose to adopt instead of acquire an animal through other means, like a breeder. Our interviewees were motivated by ethical, practical, and financial factors. Adopters mentioned wanting to give a home to a pet in need, as well as the saved money of adopting a pet that was already spayed/neutered, vaccinated, and micro-chipped. Individuals felt it was easier to find a trustworthy shelter than try and determine if an animal breeder was ethical themselves.
Hierarchical Task Analysis
After our initial research, we summarized our findings into two hierarchical tasks analyses. We analyzed the tasks of selecting a pet to adopt and formally adopting the pet and acclimating it to the home.
Design
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
We did some initial low-fidelity wireframes in Figma to start envisioning the layout and user flow of our app. During this time, we began to really iron out how our idea would be different from traditional dating style apps: the implementation of a “like” limit, and the narrowing down feature. We feared that indecisive users might swipe forever, which wouldn’t help us succeed in our goal of facilitating successful adoptions. Once users hit a certain number of likes, they would be automatically re-routed to the narrowing down process, filtering out pets until they reached their top three.
Images
High-Fidelity Wireframes
We moved on to high-fidelity wireframes and implemented prototyping functionality in Figma during this phase (some of which you’ve already seen). A large part of this process was establishing and finalizing the design language of our app. We recalled our experiences visiting in-person shelters during our observations, and sought to make our app more calm and cheerful than the in-person shelter ambiance.
Design Language
Our high-fidelity wireframes can be viewed here.
Evaluation
Moderated User Testing
We conducted moderated user testing with benchmark tasks to evaluate our prototype. Since the goal of our app was to replace the traditional shelter website in the adoption process, we also compared the app to an existing shelter website to better understand if we had achieved our goal. Participants were given the task to make a list of ten pets that they were potentially interested in adopting, given they lived in an apartment with a young child. We timed participants during the task and conducted a System Usability Score assessment (SUS) for both Pawnder and the shelter website.
Results
| Pawnder | Shelter Website | |
|---|---|---|
| Task Completion Time | 4 min, 13 sec | 5 min, 31 sec |
| Mean SUS Score (0 to 100) | 72.0 | 67.5 |
| General Satisfaction (0 to 5) | 3.8 | 3.6 |
When asked to rank various design features in Pawnder, users found information in pet profiles, swiping left and right on pet information cards, and narrowing down preferred pets from an existing list to be Pawnder’s most intuitive and helpful features.