PetWatch
A Responsive App Design For Pet Breeders
Project @ Carnegie Mellon HCI Institute
Cooperated Project With Katie Sun and Lawrence Zheng
PetWatch is a smart watch-based software for pet breeders in shelters to better feed and regulate pets waiting for adoption. Breeders can upload, record and receive updates about the pets on a cross-device platform.
Background
Pet Shelters Call for Efficiency
Due to COVID-19, people showed a rising demand of pets in order to provide accompany and emotional support. At the same time, consequently, the pet shelters are often fully occupied and the workers are totally overwhelmed. Under this pressure, many pets in shelter are experiencing lower living condition or mistakenly fed due to irregular schedules of the feeders.
Primary Research
Formulating the Problem
In order to understand the nuanced needs of pet adoptions’ customers, service providers, and business owners, as well as the existing infrastructure of the service system, we conducted both informational background research and first-hand, on-the-ground contextual inquiry.
We visited Black Cat Market in Bloomfield, an adoption center affiliated with Frankie’s Friends, a veterinary clinic, adoption, rehabilitation, and education center. Our activities ranged from participating in the service ourselves, to passive observation and shadowing of customers (potential adopters) and interviews with service providers and the center owner.
They said...
"In the pandemic period, the pet adoption rate in our shelter increased by 37%..."
"I think definitely more people need emotional support as they work from home."
"It is harder for animals to come in and out. The regulation of transport is becoming more strict."
Primary Research
Problem Conclusion
1. There is an overwhelming amount of information to juggle for all parties, and the existing infrastructure to support that is low-tech, repetitive, and highly manual (e.g. Excel sheets, simple word doc forms, papers with pets information taped onto kennel doors, etc.)
2. There’s a high rate of entry/turnover. Accordingly, it’s extraordinarily difficult for service providers to establish ‘typical’ day-to-day patterns.
4. Every animal has its own diet, many are on highly specific medication and care regimens.
5. A pet shelter is high-agility environment.
Primary Research
Client Portrait
- Created personas for service providers and business owners.
- Curated scenes and storyboards to deeper analyze the conditions users may encounter
- Narrowed down the specific need for the product: What is the most demanded function and what is the most efficient feature. Listed the potential features and made further research and revisions towards final cuts.
Feeding
The product should MAINLY consider about the feeding process of the pets in the shelter. It should be an effective tool aiming to reduce the feeding time and minimize the potential mistakes that may occur.
Connections
The product should give noticements and instructions timely to bring a tighter connection between the pets and the breeder.
Documenting
The product should allow a direct process and give instructions towards the vaccination process of specific pets. This keeps the regulation of animal adoption more simple.
Objective
Our Solutions
1
Provide a efficient method of organizing information of the pets for breeders. It should allow the breeder to EDIT information for specific pets including their medical information and feeding needs.
2
Provide a RECORD system that breeders can use as the breeding process goes on. This may not need the breeders to manually "finish" this task in the app.
3
Provide noticements and reminders for breeders since there may be many pets for one breeder. These should be jumped out automatically, or at least can be accessed in a very simple way.
Solution Digestion
Which Information Goes Where?
For a truly responsive design, information should be curated for each device, not just resized and scaled down. Hence, we need to think:
What is the user's end goal, and what are the minimum steps and/or elements that are required to create an intuitive and seamless flow that helps individuals achieve task success?
We adopted a progressive-enhancement approach, and determined that the fundamental flow would require 4 steps:
A time-based notification-prompted point of entry
An information display about supplies
A way to identify the pet and prompt corresponding info
A way to mark task completion for individual pets + groups
Design Iteration
Basic Skeleton: Watch First & RFID
Thinking about the direct needs of the breeders, we decided to make the application Apple Watch Based instead of common phone based app. Considering that the environment and condition while breeding may NOT create a suitable environment for using the phone, we proposed that everything needed should be prepared before starting to breed and does not need any further actions.
We took advantage of situational factors (e.g. all dogs are microchipped) to provide the right set of information in the right context. Introduced the system of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), we can have a quicker access to the specific information for specific pets. In other words, instead of providing all the dogs’ information at once and requiring a service provider to then click into each pet, RFID allows us scan and identify the right pet, and provide only that which is immediately relevant– what does Joey need for breakfast?
Functionalities
Problem of Occlusion
We accounted for reduced screen size by dynamically increasing the size of the most relevant module on scroll (by either swiping the screen or rotating the Digital Crown on the side). This way, users can see what they need at a high-level, and still be able to read the text.
Functionalities
Voice Capability
Outside of the information revealing priorities, we were also able to create an even more hands-free experience by including voice interactions through a Siri integration. Hence, users can easily get information that they want.
Responsive Design Solution
Medium into Fidelity: Mobile for Service Providers
Accordingly, if mobile is to occupy a middle ground between a watch and web device, how much more information should we offer?
Obviously, though the focus point in our final workflow is the watch interface, we should still preserve the basic functions and controls on the cellphone since we cannot expect everyone using this workflow to have a watch. The mobile interface should combine the function of the watch and desktop interfaces, achieving a minimum viable ability to edit pets in addition to the basic functionality of the watch.
With this orientation, we designed a mobile interface for pet details. The added screen space allowed for more information granularity, and still higher efficiency than a web-only interface.
Responsive Design Solution
Dashboard Design: Web for Business Owners
We decided that for the desktop display, we would mainly focus on administrative tasks that would be hard to accomplish using the watch or the smartphone displays.
We determined that the increased real-estate of the web display and easy access to a physical keyboard would allow for increased ease of use for business owners sitting at a desk inputting information, as opposed to service providers who would be on the go while feeding the different pets.
We also designed a dashboard view so that business owners would be able to see a big-picture view of the pet shelter (including the pets at the facility and the tasks to be completed by employees) since we determined that this would provide more value compared to on-the-go alerts for this specific interface.
Pivoting and Critique
Hidden Stakeholders
We pushed our understanding of the ‘customer’ from the obvious answer (the adopter)-- an important party in the pet adoption process is the pet itself! When service providers use this app, they create a database of data (with feeding, medication, behavioral info and patterns) that can be then shared with a pet’s adopter to ease the transition from the shelter to their new home. This will assist our customer persona, Joey, not only with easing adaptation to a novel environment, but also offer schedule consistency that can prevent anything from gastrointestinal upset to something potentially more fatal. Our team learned that it’s important to zoom out and consider hidden stakeholders, both in terms of added value and potential negative impact.
Pivoting and Critique
Afterthoughts
From the beginning of our exploration, we determined that smartwatches screens would be incredibly well-suited towards the specific context. Smartwatches are lightweight and easy to carry around, and unlike with smartphones service providers wouldn’t have to constantly take their phone out of their pockets to refer to information while they already have their hands full. The one caveat was that smartwatch ownership is not nearly as widespread as smartphone ownership, so we knew we would have to include designs for the smartphone as well, but we were intrigued by the possibilities that the smartwatch screen could offer in terms of convenience and accessibility.
We quickly found, however, that the screen dimensions of the smartwatch also provided clear limitations. Text inputs and screens with a lot of interactions would not be user friendly on a watch screen, since the risk of unintended inputs would be extremely high (which would only be exacerbated by the occlusion problem). Thus, we decided to give greater thought to what types of interactions would be well suited for the smartwatch, and what types of interactions to relegate to other devices.
Overall, this gave us a greater appreciation for how to design for different screen sizes in a manner different from simply scaling the same screens up or down depending on the screen size. Perhaps most crucially, we realized that designs for different screen sizes don’t exist in isolation. We designed our service so that interactions from different devices would be able to work in tandem (e.g. being able to add a pet on desktop and have the pet’s information show up on the watch), and this resulted in more thoughtful design that considers the context of when people are choosing to use different devices.
