A New Way to Find a Purrfect Pal
A design challenge to connect people looking for a new pet with their ideal companion.
Some Quick Research
Before diving into possible designs, I decided to do a quick search of online adoption resources for New Yorkers and found some pretty clear limitations.
- Few filter options. Filters were generally limited to the pet’s physical attributes. I couldn’t find examples of filtering by temperament, activity level, health issues, care requirements, friendliness with humans or other animals, and other more subtle traits that are still crucial to adopting a perfect pet.
- Only a few shelters were represented by one site. Any given site represented pets from only a few local shelters. If I wanted to explore more shelters, I had to search across multiple websites. I was also very limited location-wise despite being willing to, for example, travel outside of New York City to pick up a pet.
- Sites offered little guidance on what kind of pet would be most suitable to my lifestyle. Even if there were an abundance of filter options, I wouldn’t necessarily know which ones to use if I’m new to adopting or haven’t had pets before.
I spoke to some friends who had a broad range of experience rescuing pets about the resources they utilized and where they felt they fell short. I observed the following trends:
- Veteran adopters already knew the system. They knew the shelters in the area and where to look to find their pets. They also knew what to look for in a pet as they had experience caring for pets already.
- First-time adopters felt more lost. They went into the process not knowing much more beyond whether they wanted a dog or a cat. They rarely knew of more than a couple shelters near them.
I decided to cater to first-time adopters as there were fewer consolidated resources available to them and they had no knowledge from previous adoptions to fall back on.
I wanted to create a solution that would educate and guide first-time adopters choosing a pet.
Design Time
One of my solutions was an optional quiz that offers users guidance on what to look for in a pet based on their lifestyle. After, they would be directed to pets that might be a good fit rather than bringing them to a list of every pet. I also came up with alternate ways of comparing pets and learning about individual pets to help adopters feel more confident about their choice.
The optional quiz asks some standard questions, but the two screens below show why this quiz goes beyond standard filter options.
The user is first prompted to fill out information about their lifestyle to help gage what type of pet would be most suited.
There are ample clickable help buttons to provide more information about why a question is being asked and how their response might impact which pet they should adopt.
The second screen is pre-filled based on the inputs from the first screen to reduce the cognitive burden of learning about various temperaments. However, the user can modify the second screen as needed or choose to read more about temperaments to help them make an informed decision without relying on the pre-filled values.
First-time adopters liked this concept because it gave them an all-in-one way to learn about what kinds of pets might be best for them and presented them with recommended adoption options.
They liked that the quiz made them think about important things that they might not even have considered otherwise (temperament and exercise requirements, specifically).
I also designed a few ways to view the results once the quiz is completed.
The first is a standard list view where the user can modify the sort order and the filters set during the initial quiz. The user can also switch to a graph view which allows the user to compare pets by selecting any two metrics from drop-downs on the axes of a graph.
While the list view is standard, users appreciated being able to modify the sort and filter options without having to go back and retake the quiz.
The graph also got positive reviews for being a less standard, but very useful, way of comparing pets visually without having to open up multiple profiles for a side-by-side comparison.
When looking at individual pets, the user first comes to a standard profile of the pet, but to help first-time adopters better understand what living with a specific pet would be like, there’s a “Day in the Life” page for each pet. This would give the potential owner a sense of how much care is required. The schedule would include things like walks, meals, medication, play time, naps, etc.
Users liked being able to view the “Day in the Life” screen because they felt it gave them a more accurate way to picture what owning and caring for a specific pet might look like and how they might go about building it into their existing routines.
What are the limitations of this design?
It’s always crucial to examine the feasibility of a design because a design that can’t be built is worthless to stakeholders. While this was just a design challenge, I did consider some possible obstacles to bringing my design to life.
- The product relies on getting pet information from many different shelters. Not every shelter is likely to provide identical data points necessary for the quiz and filters to work accurately. The “Day in the Life” screen poses the same problem. It relies on shelter volunteers supplying the information/images needed to make the page.
- The graph has the potential to be difficult to read on mobile, and even desktop, as the number of data points to be plotted grows.
