Hi! I designed P'awww dog walking app, with the primary focus on guest checkout and dog walking for the initial version of the product.

Design Brief

This was our first assignment for the Dribble Product Design course.

The challenge was to help connect dog owners with dog walkers when they needed help caring for and walking their dogs.

Problem Statement

Create a service where dog owners can find quickly and easily find reliable dog walkers near them.

Design Approach

User-centered design as an iterative design process is used through out each phase of the assignment.

1. Research & Empathize

Understand the needs and pain points of dog owners.

What have been their experiences - good and bad using the services that are currently available in the market?

1.1 Interviews

The interviews really helped digging deeper to identify how are dog owners finding help right now? What's their criteria for selecting a dog walker? What services they use? What service they wish they could find?

I conducted 5 phone interviews and sent out 5 questionnaire to different people at work, in my neighborhood and some family members.

1.2 Market Research

I reviewed two of the apps most used apps that 70% of my interviewees have been using.

1.3 Designing Persona

After analyzing the information from user interviews and market analysis, I designed the persona to create a realistic representation of my target user group which helped me focus on designing the features for the app.

User Flows

The user flow was iterated a few times to ensure there were no dead ends. It was also during this phase that I inclined towards the no-profile/guest check out option. As I was going through the interview results, 80% of the users mentioned abandoning the app on several occasions and wanting a quicker option to book a dog walker.

Visual Design

The ability to choose multiple services at once and custom walking time was the goal for my persona so I provided the option to select multiple services and added a slider for custom time selection.

After reviewing the initial design to five users, I choose only three low-time commitment services: Walking, Mingle, Drop-Off for the app.

I also revised the dog walker card to show per hour prices and included response time, upcoming activity details when provided by the dog walker.

These changes were included in the Prototype.

Mood Board

Dribbble has been a great place to find inspiration from fellow designers. I created a mood board to find other dog walking app deigns and really liked Gold as a Primary color to represent love, compassion and fun.

With my color palette ready, I also added typography to create a Styleguide for my designs.

Scaling Design

As I was working through the visual design and prototyping I started compiling a list of reusable components and their variants. These was really helpful to update the darker/lighter variation of the color palette when the different components were tested for accessibility.

Prototype & Testing

The next step was to link the screens together and create a prototype for testing with a fellow dog owner.

I was only able to get 3 users to test the prototype. Each user tested the prototype individually, for one of the user I provider user missions to perform a certain action, with the other two I observed while they interacted with the prototype on their own.

The feedback from the user testing was really valuable.

One of the feedback items that I had missed was the size and the age of dog in the first selection screen which I assumed to be secondary selection criteria and have added it as a filter item.

Another item was being clear on the total price if multiple services were selected that required more than an hour or a custom time frame that I'll refine in the next iteration of the prototype.