Therapaw
Designing a way to connect people with dogs
My Role: UX Designer | Duration: 2 Weeks | Project Status: Completed
Recent studies indicate that simply petting a dog can lower the stress hormone, Cortisol. It can also reduce loneliness and feelings of depression.
Engaging with dogs helps with increasing physical activity, providing companionship, providing sensory stress relief.
But, if you don’t have the time, money, or ability to own a dog full-time, what are some of the ways people could experience the health benefits of spending time with dogs?
We set out to explore the problem space by defining our target audience as people who would like to get stress relief by spending time with dogs but don’t always have access to dogs and are unable to take on full time responsibility of owning a dog.
What do we need to know?
In order to learn more about people’s experiences with dogs and how that could affect their mental health/stress level, we conducted user interviews.
We asked questions about their experience with dogs and stress in order to validate/invalidate our assumption that there is a negative correlation (more interaction with dogs = less stress) between time with dogs and stress level.
Here’s what we learned —
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Users find that being around dogs helped them feel stress relieved.
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Dogs make a positive impact on their life.
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Being with dogs engages them in physical activities.
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They enjoy how dogs give them attention and affection.
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Some users don’t want to take on the responsibility of dogs since they have limitations with time.
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Some users would like to own a dog but cannot due to financial constraints.
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Some find owning a dog impacts their social life.
Meet the User
In order to summarize our research and to serve as our focus throughout the design process, we created a persona, a visual representation of our target audience. Meet Megan.
Goals:
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Wants to feel comforted when stressed
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Wants to get her mind off work
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Wants company/plans on the days she doesn’t have to work
Needs:
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Needs affection and to feel understood
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Needs someone / something to distract her from her worries
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Needs something to do according to her schedule
Frustrations:
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She struggles to express her feelings in words so people often don’t know when she is stressed
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Her fiance and friends are extremely busy
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Her fiance and friends are busy almost every day of the week
“I want to be understood and comforted even when I don’t have the energy to explain my feelings”
The Problem
With the data collected from our user interviews, we created a problem statement that will serve as the foundation of the rest of our design process.
“How might we give people who deal with stress, the opportunity to be with a dog they want, without the responsibility of owning, to ultimately relieve their stress by providing love and comfort?”
The Goal
We want to give people convenient access to dogs to play with and destress with hopes that they will build a relationship with the dog which could potentially lead to adoption.
Time spent with dog
Relationship built
Adoption
Where do we get the dogs?
Our key potential partner is ASPCA. Why? We believe that ASPCA's mission and our mission perfectly align. We believe that we will work along side those goals with confidence that we can better the care and community of dogs along side ASPCA.
ASPCA's Mission—
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Increase adoption of pets
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Care for homeless pets
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Improve the local community & vets
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Prevent cruelty of pets
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Increase volunteers
How does ASPCA benefit? We can increase engagement with the shelter through our app and help people to build a relationship with the dogs which will lead to increased conversion of adoption.
Our Solution
After emphasizing with our user by putting ourselves in our user's shoes through a journey map, creating a feature prioritization, MoSCoW map, and researching our competitors, we established the features that will be incorporated into our product.
Findings—
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People noticed dogs have improved their emotional well being
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People prefer to be with dogs based on the dogs physical and personality traits
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People find that they cannot care for a dog 24/7
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People are often have busy schedule
Features —
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Ability to book a visit with a dog
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A feature that matches people with dogs based on their preferences
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No commitment dog play dates
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Ability to schedule a visit depending on users availability
Our Product
Introducing Therapaw, Comfort Whenever Needed. Therapaw is an app that provides the tools to connect people to dogs whenever they want to relieve stress and where dogs can have visitors and be happy.
Round One Testing
In order to test the usability of Therapaw, we conducted five, moderated usability tests with our mid-fidelity prototype. We defined user goals by creating three scenarios and tasks for the user to complete on the prototype.
Tasks—
1
You just downloaded Therapaw and you want to personalize your dog results. Input the criteria/qualities you want in the dogs.
2
You just finished personalizing the results. Find the youngest puppy and save it to your liked dog list.
3
You are really interested in playing with this dog. Schedule the earliest time this morning for a play date.
In order to test the usability of Therapaw, we conducted five, moderated usability tests. We defined user goals by creating three scenarios and tasks for the user to complete on the prototype.
Here’s what we learned —
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Users thought their dog preferences should be located on "Dog Search" screen rather than "Settings" Screen.
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Users had difficulty navigating to the preferences screen.
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Users were unsure how to save their dog preferences because they were not aware it was autosave and there was no button to save.
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Users would rather use filter option to find the youngest dog (task 3) than scroll.
Making Adjustments
With our users’ mental models in mind following round one of testing, we made adjustments to improve the usability of Therapaw. Round two was tested on our high-fidelity prototype.
Before
After
Round Two Testing
In order to validate the changes made from the first round, we conducted a second round of testing with the same tasks to compare the results.
Here are the results—
Task 1: Personalize your dog results
Task 2: Find the youngest puppy
Task 3: Schedule a time to meet with the puppy
Average Success Rate
- 50 %
Average Success Rate
+ 10 %
Average Success Rate
+ 10 %
Average Time on Task
+ 47.2 Seconds
Average Time on Task
- 15 Seconds
Average Time on Task
- 7 Seconds
Analysis—
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There was 50% decrease in success rate and increase by 47.2 seconds on time on task for task 1.
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Why? Users were confused because the task started on the Settings screen.
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There was a 10% increase in success rate and decrease by 15 seconds on time on task for task 2.
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There was a 10% increase in success rate and decrease by 7 seconds on time on task for task 2.
Next Steps
Having successfully developed a product that can increase interactions between people and shelter dogs, we believe that Therapaw can be benefit both the emotional well-being of humans and dog. However, the research never stops. We want to continue to test and improve Therapaw. Here are our recommendations for the future.
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Research and test the Preferences task from the home page
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Add text under the navigation bar icons
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Provide users with "suggested dogs"
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QR Code to check-in, this would help us track user retention
Let's connect!