Overview

Play Dates 4 Dogs is an online community bringing dogs and their owners together for playdates and experiences. Along with dating, it has a directory to search for dog friendly parks, eateries, hotels, animal hospitals, vets, and other dog-specific venues. It also has a feature for searching a lost dog and it provides an online market place for dog products.

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Android
iOS

My Role

I lead the UX effort on the website and mobile app & the techniques I used are:

  • Information Architecture
  • Low Fidelity Prototype
  • High Fidelity Design
  • Heuristics Evaluation
  • Collaboration with Developers
A new website and mobile app design for a dog community

The Goal

A platform for innovation and deeper engagement

Design a website and app to be easy to navigate, fun to use, informative, helpful, and a whole bunch of other things that are available now or will become available in the future.

  • Set up a Play Date which is fast and easy to use for everyone, everywhere
  • Share photos and videos post the play date
  • Create a dog-friendly directory
  • Searching a lost dog
  • Create an online Store for unique and interesting products for dogs

UX Challenges

Creating an engaging experience

To bring joyful and engaging experience, we need extensive user research and competitor analysis, but we did not find any reference for dating services for dogs. It made the task of competitor analysis, tough.

I was the only UX designer in the project and getting diverse UX ideas was a tough job.

Solutions:

We divided the features into different parts like book a date, rating, sharing photos, etc. Then searched for references for these features.

I was the only designer so fetched in other team members from developers and business analysts to get their feedback on design and prototype testing.

The Approach

What process we followed to solve the problem

Brainstorming
Brainstorming
Journey Map
Journey Map
Information Architecture
Information Architecture
Customer Interview
Customer Interview
Low Fidelity Prototype
Low Fidelity Prototype
High Fidelity Design
High Fidelity Design
Collaboration with Developers
Collaboration with Developers

Once we had the business needs and user goals ready, we kicked off the project and started with brainstorming, where we had a diverse team of different skills and it helped us in getting several unique ideas. We created a project flow, set up a lo-fidelity clickable prototype, using Axure RP, to provide usability insights and ensure the design concept works as intended. We had a lot of iteration and prototype testing before we came up with high fidelity designs. Then I collaborated with the development team and shared the assets and style guides.

Low Fidelity Prototyping

Testable and tangible artifacts

The most striking truth of the curve is that zero users give zero insights.

The Nielson Norman Group

Low-fidelity (lo-fi) prototyping is a quick and easy way to translate high-level design concepts into tangible and testable artifacts. I worked on it to test the functionality and flow and it also provided usability insights.

A new website and mobile app design for a dog community

High Fidelity Design

Highly-functional and interactive prototyping

Once we had a solid understanding of what we are going to build we started creating a Hi-fidelity prototype where we worked on pixel-perfect polished designs with colors, typography, icons, and graphics to make the designs look visually appealing.

Setting a play date for dogs

We made the setting a play date as easy as pie. Users can filter potential play dates by breed, age, weight, temperament, and other factors deemed to be valuable to their selection process. They get a list of dogs with 5 bone rating and select the best dog for play date. Chat or message the dog owner and finalize the date and venue.

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Post dating activities

Post dating, dog owners can rate each other's dog, share photos, and videos.

Smart filters to enhance dog searching experience

To enhance the Dog Searching experience, we introduced filters specific to location, proximity, sex, breed, etc, where users can browse dogs for dating easily.

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Dog friendly directory

We presented a dog-friendly directory to search for dog-friendly parks, eateries, hotels, animal hospitals, vets, and other dog-specific venues. The development team integrated Yelp for this feature. One can see the locations on a customized map.

Responsive Website Design

Desktop and mobile friendly

The flow and functionality of the mobile application and the website are almost the same. The website has got some additional features like store, blog, and event. With the increasing number of mobile users today, it became necessary to make any website mobile-friendly and we created a responsive website that works on any device.

A new website and mobile app design for a dog community

Learnings

Outcomes and Lessons

Working as a solo UX designer

As a single UX designer in the project I suffered from tunnel vision, Generally, I prefer to talk to other designers to brainstorm different ideas. As I did not have a choice, I learned to collaborate with other team members, outside the design team to get their ideas.

Tool selection

I used Photoshop Artboard for Mobile App design and as the number of artboards increased, it became very slow and it was tough to move any object. It was the first time I used Artboards for a big project and had to suffer a lot.

Graphic file format for mobile application

For mobile applications, I provided the graphic assets in PDF format for iOS and SVG format for Android and saved time creating multiple sized PNG graphics. It worked for the developers.

Next Project

Dr. Reddy

Crafting a new experience for a doctor & patient app

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