Furever Pets

I began my UX strategy by identifying the challenges I would encounter and what I would need to focus on to solve those problems.

This process enabled me to create an easy and intuitive process where pet owners can manage a detailed health plan for their pets with access to their pet healthcare practitioner or service provider.

My research begins with  a competitive analysis of the top three pet wellness apps that I felt were close to fulfilling my objectives.

All of these applications are great for organizing your pets schedules, medications, and health. They all contain services and information that I would love in one app.

Buddies by Blue Buffalo is a great and robust app. They have a variety of features and services to give you lots of information on your pets. But they are only specific to their company and their products. I think their design and flow is easy to use and they have a pleasing aesthetic.

‍PetDesk overall contains all the features I think pet enthusiasts would need and want. This app has optimal features for organizing your pet’s health as well as booking video appointments, which no other app has the ability to do.

‍MyPetsWellness is just an appointment and calendaring system. It works only with the veterinary offices that use it. There is no other features outside of that on the app.

Overall, if I had to choose one app to model it would be PetDesk because it contains the most features, access to making appointments, articles and information on pet health. and It is not specific to location, veterinary office or company.

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In gathering all this information I was able to create a persona that embodies an optimal user of the Furever Pets app.

After my competitive analysis was complete I moved on to creating a test plan to prepare to interview 4 pet owners who are very involved in taking care of their pets.

- All my participants had very similar desires for the health of their pets.
- They all were highly interested in creating a health plan that gives them a rubric on how to take care of their pet’s needs.
- Each of my participants put a lot of time and money into their pets and they care about providing the best quality of life and doing the right things when it comes to any medical or health related issues.

Overall they all want the convenience of being able to easily access all their pet’s information as well as information to better their pet’s lives in one place. Direct communication through the app to their veterinarian, local pet services such as grooming, pet sitting, pet insurance, etc., shopping for pet supplies, and much more would be something they would all utilize. 
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Now that my strategy has been defined and my empathy research completed, I was able to create both a task and user flow that displays what my target user will go through:
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    * Launch the app and go through the registration process
    * Add a pet profile
    * She will then have the option of creating a Wellness plan for the pet she just added.
    * Then she will link back to the dashboard page where she can access all the resources she        needs in the app.

I began sketching the following screens to outline the registration process and pet profile screens. There will be two main dashboard screens:
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The Account Screen
The Pet Profile Screen

Both screens display options on what paths they would like to complete from the one main screen.
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After determining the task and user flow I sketched out the registration and pet profile screens.

I have finalized the primary dashboards, providing users with the ability to select their desired pathways for completion directly from the main interface.
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The brand strategy for this project was to make the app design pleasing, friendly and approachable. The final look and feel needed to be positive, fun, clean and inviting to function as a playful pet app but also as a professional health app.
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The high fidelity mockups were completed once I determined my brand strategy. These screens display multiple CTA opportunities to manage the health of your pets.

I conducted 4 in-person usability tests on the following prototype. Each were tested on the following scenarios:

Each of my test users have multiple pets and lead very different lifestyles. They all loved the concept of the app but the main challenges were adding detailed information as well as updating that info on a regular basis.

This project was great to work on because I am passionate about my pets and I would definitely use this product myself. However, I did encounter challenges in creating an efficient mobile app that users would actually utilize and manage. I learned that the process of creating the wellness plan had to be more streamlined and efficient. There were specific areas of the process that each of my users would take more time to input more data versus others. Overall, I really enjoyed the experience in working on the design challenges of this app and I would love to go further into refining other features as well, such as creating a virtual screen to enable virtual appointments.