Introducing
DogGo
an automated pet care app that incorporates your local weather
In October I participated in a one-week hackathon. The theme of the Hackathon was “Automate Your Life.” My team consisted of 5 UX designers and 5 developers. This was a super fun and project and a great learning experience, that required constant collaboration amongst the designers and with the developers. And to cap it off we won Crowd favorite!
We knew right off the bat that we wanted to do an app, and as a team we decided to focus on pet care. We were all pet owners and talked about the different aspects of pet care we could automate.
Since October, a small group of UX designers and developers have continued to work on this app, and hope to deploy it to the app store soon. Stay Tuned for updates!
Key Findings:
There are currently no dog walking apps that feature weather
Apartment living considerations- many apartment dwellers have no access to private outdoor spaces
Being able to opt-in for certain notifications and how many times a day is important to people
Notifications on air quality are important to people for their own health and the health of their pets
People want to know the severity of inclement weather (ie rain, snow, thunderstorms)
Notifications for heat considerations (ie car, water, asphalt) are especially important for dog owners
People want to be able to set time preferences & weather for alerts on when the best times are to go out
Our Key findings lead us to our initial idea:
What if there were an app that not only prompted you to walk your dog, but also adjusted your walking schedule based on the current weather conditions?
Research Phase:
Our team spoke about some issues in our everyday lives and what could be improved with automation. After going over some ideas, our team decided on a pet care app.
Due to time constraints, we used first-hand knowledge and internal interviews as well as competitive and comparative analysis for research. One thing that came up from dog owners was that they often get caught in the rain or bad weather on walks.
We decided to focus our app on a dog walking with automated walk reminders based on your schedule, and include a weather API that could send alerts to the user about inclement weather in their walk times.
When discussing potential issues with going on your daily dog walk, we had a thought: “What if there were an app that not only prompted you to walk your dog but also adjusted your walking schedule based on the current weather conditions?” — this helped spark this sparked the inspiration for “DogGo”
After aligning on the initial inspiration for our app design, we then dove into some research. We focused on researching existing apps on the market and used pet owner perspectives based on the pet care struggles we expressed as a team.
For our competitive and comparative analysis we looked at both dog walking apps and weather apps. One of the apps called “DogNote” featured the ability to set up customizable pet care reminders to share with your whole family. It also featured a simple and easy to understand User Interface.
We then looked at some Weather apps next to see how the information is provided to help keep you up to date on the weather forecast. The Apple weather app featured inclement weather notifications with an approximate time for the next rainfall, which you could potentially use to help you plan your daily activities.
Since we had a short timeframe to make this app, and most of our team has pets, we used firsthand experiences to inform our decisions. We decided to do user research through usability testing of the prototype later on, rather than external interviews in the early stages.
Persona:
With our research in mind we set to work creating a persona, to focus our design process.
Meet Doug Walker, who lives in a small apartment in Portland, OR. Doug recently adopted a puppy, Fido. Doug wants to keep Fido active and get his energy out. He works from home and has a relatively free schedule. He wants to plan his walks around weather conditions, avoiding severe weather and bad air quality when possible.
In the first couple months of owning Fido he has already been caught in the rain a few times. knowing in advance how to dress (himself and Fido) for the weather, and any times to avoid a walk would be a huge relief to Doug!
Problem Statement:
Doug recently adopted a 1-year-old dog, Fido, and is having a difficult time adjusting to his new apartment and unpredictable weather patterns in Portland.
Doug needs a way to stay up to date on the optimal time to take Fido out so he can avoid a bad experience due to inclement weather.
How Might We’s:
Help Doug stick to a regular walking routine?
Notify Doug when he should not take Fido on a walk due to inclement weather?
Incorporate details specific to Fido to provide relevant and personalized recommendations to Doug?
User Flows:
Next, we created user flows. The flows helped up prioritize our design. We focused on the onboarding process, as well as how a user would get suggestions for new activities to do with their dog. The below flow has the user utilize the AI chat feature to figure out how to entertain their puppy when there is inclement weather and they can’t go for a walk.
Mid-Fi Wire Frames:
We next created a few mid-fidelity mockups from our user flows. These showed the main features of our app, such as location services for personalized weather notifications and weather condition preferences.
These Mid-Fi wire frames were a huge help to the developer team. We were able to pass them along to the developers mid way through our very quick week. This allows the developers to start building out the app while the UX team finished our Hi-Fi prototype, and make UI decisions.
This constant collaboration and communication was key to our success.
Hi-Fi Prototype:
After our Mid-Fi Prototypes, we finished out our Hi-fi Prototypes.
This included the entire onboarding process, and the functionality of the home screen.
As you can see to the right the user is greeted by the log in/sign up page. once they start the sign up process, the are told the purpose of allowing the location services, and have the added UX element of a status bar along the bottom of their screen. During onboarding, all in screens are above the fold, so ensure that the user does not miss anything.
Once the user has finished the onboarding process, they are brought to their homepage.
on the homepage they can see their specific local weather (based on the weather channel API), the walking schedule they add during onboarding, and the navigation bar along the bottom of the app.
If the user has not completed their onboarding they will be confronted with a pop up alert reminding them to make changed in their settings.
In settings they can allow location services, and update what weather conditions they would like to be alerted about.
Usability Tests:
Next Steps:
If we had more time on this project a couple of features that we would love to expand the app to include are:
Push notifications with weather specific information
Import calendar/work calendar
Ability to add in medication schedule and receive notification reminders about those
A “Family Hub” feature, so that family members can all have profiles and receive notifications
Expand to other pet species and their relevant alerts
Set specific schedules for alerts
And add in more chat functionality for pet suggestions
Current Progress:
After our hackathon a small group of our team (3 UX designers and 3 developers) decided to continue working on on DogGo and work to officially launch the app on the Apple App store.
We are continuing to work towards that goal!
Since the hackathon, we have conducted 12 interviews, and expensive research. One aspect of the app we have been focusing on is how people prefer to receive notifications. This will help us to shape the tone of the app, and ensure that as we continue to create DogGo we will meeting the needs of our users.