Making PetFlat app
The process of working on a product design for Android phone application
Hey! This is an article about product design for faux mobile application made in my free time just to practice — I illustrated the main steps and questions that I faced during my work.
1. Research
As far as I didn’t want to give new look to already existing apps, I’d like to make something that hasn’t been realized yet. Also the app should be interesting from UX point of view, not too overwhelmed, making me break my head over clean, elegant, and handy for users solutions.
I started with exploring problems and inconveniences in people’s daily life that can be enhanced with the help of mobile application. Once, my friend complained to me that she had troubles with finding a host for her cat while she was in business trips or just travelling. This sounded interesting, furthermore, I personally was OK with hosting somebody’s pet for a week or two.
Hence, I came up with an app concept that would make it easy to find a person able to host your pet when you are travelling.
I provided an exploration that showed that:
- yes, there’s actually a bunch of people that are ready to take other’s pet for couple of days or weeks (for free or for some compensation);
- yes, people can leave their pet to unknown person (the system of rating and feedbacks from previous users can help to build trusted relationships in the app).
Short interviews with people helped me to understand different needs and build personas for the app. Even some unexpected solutions came up: for example, my colleague said that she had a great mind to buy a cat, but alas her son had a fur allergy. She supposed buying a sphynx would solve the problem, but she’d like to “test” a sphynx for a week to make sure there wouldn’t be any health problems (that showed a “breed” filter may be needed in app).
I used Coggle Mindmap to list personas according to the data I faced during the interviews and to make first steps in listing the functional of the future app and possible flows.
2. Prototyping
I started with exploring apps with similar functional and structure. As I was going to make the users capable both to search for a host and become a host themselves, I was interested in apps where user can search for other’s services and provide/manage his own service — like Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, and apps where users can create their groups or pages.
According to the users’ needs, the main screens of the app suppose to be:
- searching for a host (by days, type of the pet, location, price, rating),
- history (future and previous hostings — in case pet owner wants to give his pet to the person who already hosted it previously)
- messages (method of communication between pet owners and hosts; new requests for hosting appear here as well)
- profile (information about user, his pet if any, rating for hosts, feedback)
- be a host (indication of conditions you are OK to host a pet — dates, type, quantity, price)
As far as inner screens wouldn’t have too complicated views, I decided to make all menu items visible via tabs rather than bury them in navigation drawer.
I used Invision for prototyping — you can open clickable prototype directly on your phone that gives an impression you’re using the real app.
Prototype user testing showed some enhancements to be done : update flow of sending a request to the host, add ability to see all hosts near me on the map.
3. High-fidelity mockups
After few iterations of prototyping and testing it was time to polish visual design.
Here’s the full high-fidelity clickable prototype that allows walking through the main flows from the very beginning:
(you can open the link either on computer or on mobile phone)
Animations
Since Invision doesn’t provide opportunities for detailed animation, I used Framer to show some of them.
…and just a few trifles made with love
4. What’s next?
I’m going to practice coding, but this also wouldn’t be the final step of this journey — I’d rather say it’s the beginning of multiple enhancements based on users’ feedback.
Actually there are some questions open. Do users like adding short info about themselves or do they rather leave this field empty? What search filters do they use more frequently and what additional filters do they need? Or may they want gallery of pets’ photos? Does host want not to wait for requests but to search for pets with his own hands? What way of payment is more convenient for pet owners — directly to the host or through the app via bank card? …and that’s even not all of them.
User testing and gathering feedback and data from the app will provide some information to think about.
Making this app and exploration of users’ needs became an interesting challenge for me that resulted in — I believe— a nice and useful experience. And thanks to my friends and colleagues who became keenly engaged in this concept and helped me with all their feedback.
Have nice user stories!
