PROJECT OVERVIEW
An app designed to help dog owners train their dogs and bond with their dogs during the process. The app features a bite-sized training video, progress tracker, discover social page, and built-in clicker and whistle.
TEAM MEMBER + ROLES
TOOLS
Chia-I Chen -
UX Designer
Elizabeth Wood -
UX Designer
Tim Robbins -
UX Designer
CHALLENGES
Many dog owners need a way to train their dogs in a fun, inexpensive, and timely manner. Professional training can be very expensive and time-consuming. They not only need to track their dogs' progress but maintain it as well.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Wendy is a fun and busy dog mom who needs self-led bite-sized training steps because professional dog training is too expensive and time-restrictive.
OUR GOALS
Develop a mobile dog training app that is dedicated to quick and affordable hands-on training at the user’s choice of pace.
Provide engaging content to enhance the dog training experience.
An affordable and fun training exercise
Self-led bite-sized training steps
Training achievements
Social features
Training notification
RESEARCH/ANALYSIS
With a fairly detailed project brief in hand, we first created an online survey to get an idea of the common pain points experienced by dog owners and the factors that influence their decision-making process around dog training.
We distributed our survey through various channels, and within 48 hours were able to begin synthesizing data from 21 respondents. we discovered that users are discouraged from seeking out professional dog training because of the price and time commitment.
We also conducted interviews with 6 participants to deep-dive into answers and collect more qualitative data. we believe that owners understand consistent and quick hands-on training will improve their dog's life and their own. We believe we could help with a mobile app alternative that allows users to train their dogs in a fun, simple and affordable way.
Affinity diagram aggregating the needs, wants and pain points of the dog owners interviewed by our team. Survey data provide us with better user demographics insight.
USER PERSONA
As it turned out, many of our interviewees are seeking free and effective self-training programs to help them train their dogs and have fun at the same time. Concerned about the strict training schedule and cost was one of the factors they turn to self-train their dogs. To help focus our design efforts on addressing these behaviors and pain points, we created a persona to represent the typical users of our app.
Wendy Peppercorn
Age: 34 Married, No children
Katy, TX Young Professional
Behavior Demographics
She has a 3-year-old dog
Has a healthy social life and she has puppy play dates with friends
Walks dog daily and visits dog park often
Trained her own dog with treats and affection
Motivated by increased bond and communication and enjoys friendly competition
She has little exposure to training dogs
Goals and Needs
Train dog in a timely and inexpensive manner
To see results and have a well-trained dog so her lifestyle can be positively impacted
To personally train her dog and have fun while training
A way to track her and her dog’s progress and their milestones
Training is certified
Pain Points
Not finically viable to professionally train her dog
Has little time to train her dog
Her Dog needs obedience and trick training
No quick and easy access to training information
Dog does weird things
DESIGNING THE SOLUTION
Our user research uncovered clear pain points that we needed to address with our app design. First, we would need to have free straightforward, and easy instructions for the dog training app, including multiple courses and social aspects. Next, our team conducts we use I like, I wish, and what if design thinking, we continue to brainstorm ideas that have not previously been considered. Then we prioritized our features using the 2x2 Matrix in order to uncover a few important aspects that are low complexity and high impact which we can take into our design.
USER FLOWS
To address our goals and enhance the overall dog training experience, we created user flows for tracking user progress with self-guided training lesson videos. We also created a flow for social aspects for the user to interact and exchange training experiences. The user would be able to find trouble shooting videos from other users when they encounter a training problem. in addition, we have created a build clicker and whistle which can be used during the training process.
User flow was created based on 4 main flows:
Training lessons with video upload and share on discover page functions
Discover pages
Profile to track progress and see posts
Build in whistle and clicker
SKETCHES & LO-FI WIREFRAMES
While sketching key screens for creating tracking progress, we took inspiration from the Candy Crash game and created a game-like progress tracking train with a custom dog breed in the train as our main theme. And design with the goal of incorporating features that most directly addressed user wants and needs uncovering in our user research.
We created a simple sketching prototype to perform usability testing of each user flow and validate our designs. We found users prefer the training page as the home page and add more social functions. We reiterated user flow and created our lo-fi wireframe and added clicker and whistle functions.
MID-FI WIREFRAMES
After usability testing, we found our design elements are not unified and the thicknesses are different. We changed our design elements for this prototype and added a discover page.
STYLE GUIDE
After our group project ended with a mid-fi prototype, I created the style guide in order to take it into high fidelity. I kept the original primary color and added a secondary color and use it across the design.
HI-FI WIREFRAMES
I've taken all the elements and applied a style guide to give the app cohesive UI styling. I redesigned the discover page with added social functions, create interactive variants for elements, and redesign navigation tabs. Combining the user troubleshooting video page with the social function created an easier user flow and increase the function of the discover page.
PROTOTYPE
Prototype We have combined all the elements shown throughout the design process to create what we feel is a warm, functional, fun and approachable app.
CONCLUSION/REFLECTION
Future Iterations:
Timer option and tracking
Whistle choice in onboarding
Gamification & coupons
Train animation to show progress
Add more training categories
Lessons Learned:
Communication is essential to creating a cohesive product
Idea share/collaboration makes a better product
Built trust and confidence between team members
