Starting the project, I knew that we needed to understand our users. To walk their shows to talk to them and to make them a partner in our user centric design process.

I kickstarted this by creating a survey that would give us a lens into their lives, and understand a little bit. I created this survey using TypeForm, and recruited users from various local pet owners groups, including the main biggest 3 Facebook groups and existing Veterinary clinic customers.

In addition to the survey, we needed to just talk to them! At this point I’ve worked with IBM who was a long time vendor that works with the Municipality, to launch a design thinking session, and we used their creative studio as the hosting venue to invite recruited users on a Saturday (weekend) morning, and go through an exercise to collaboratively build their user journey, empathy map, then generate ideas that could help them, and together asked them to prioritize them on a graph.

Following the understanding phase through the surveys and design thinking session, we felt that we were in a good position now to take our hypothesis, continue our understanding efforts and begin problem solving, come up with a few concepts and actually test them by the end of the week. For this part I turned to the Google Design Sprint process to put all the right cross-functional stakeholders together, and problem solve side to side. This was a first as people were not used to this level of high energy collaboration workshop method, and were used to working in silos.

Going into wireframes is one of my favorite ways of quickly visualizing whats in my head and putting it down, and the beginning of my iterative design process. At this stage I took the winning solution from the sprint, and multiple great ideas from other solutions, added some additional ideas and began iterating on the product design. The wireframes also served as a great medium to collect immediate stakeholders feedback and help steer the direction of the solution early on, potentially saving time down the road.

At this point, this is where everything comes together, the brand, the color scheme, the personality, and of course the product design.

The app was tested for usability and feedback with potential users, using Lookback. I later created usability report which was used to inform design iterations.

We worked on creating a promotional video for the app, I worked on preparing the mockups and screens, and participated in the script creation and conceptualization with an external agency.