Pet owners wish they had captured all the memories of their pets in one place so they can relive the joy of their time with them, and share that joy with others.
DearHooman helps users find and collect photos and videos of their pets across all their media, and store it in one place for retrieval and sharing.
In February 2024, our team was assigned a 3-week project to research, prototype, and test an idea for a brand-new mobile application.
Our creation was DearHooman, a mobile app for pet owners to collect all their precious memories with their pets, so when they commemorated their pets' lives, they wouldn't face the frustration and pain of having to look everywhere for their media (and not finding key moments).
The biggest constraints we faced were the tight timeline, and the client requirement that our solution had to be a mobile app.
At the start of the project, my team scheduled user interviews to determine the need for this pet owner app. We used FigJam to keep track of our user research findings.
Based on our user interviews, we performed affinity diagramming, used the "I Like, I Wish, What If" method, and then created a user persona, James Saint, a late-20s school teacher, with his dog, Maisy. His biggest pain points were:
Our potential users mentioned a concern about online security, and their lack of experience with social media.
How would we bridge the gap between both sides, meeting the users' need for online security, while creating an app that essentially required access to user's media?
After completing some whiteboard working sessions, we put together a blueprint of our users' journey through DearHooman. We used the Double Diamond approach to mapping out the timeline of our project.
Potential users wanted a time capsule of pet memories they could easily go back to. However, current social media wouldn't let them keep cherished memories of just their pets, in one place.
Both from our interviewed users, and personal experiences on the team, it's a saddening and frustrating experience when, after losing a beloved pet, when we want to look back on their memories, we can't easily find them.
The problem to address for our users became:
“How might we alleviate the pet owner’s burden of collecting all their pet’s precious memories, so they can focus on cherishing their best moments with their pets?”
In addition to our user research, we also performed a competitor analysis using the SWOT method, and from there, we ideated flows to map out the user's journey from start to finish.
Shown below is our login user flow, taking the user from the initial splash screen, to their profile home page.
By conducting usability tests of our initial prototypes, we improved the users' onboarding onto the platform. Some key pieces of feedback we received and how we responded included:
This was a bootcamp project, done as part of our class. The idea of this solution came when we brainstormed possible ideas first, as a team.
It always felt awkward to me that we were being taught to understand the users' needs, and constantly reminded not to presume anything about their needs (i.e. thinking of a solution before we've had a chance to adequately understand our users), and yet, we were basically given an assignment to design an app. One could suppose it's par for the course; how else do we learn essential UX Design skills in a realistic timeframe?
However, if this had been a real client, I suppose the experience might not have been very different: I'm sure that professional UX Designers constantly experience assumptions from their clients in the form of "We've already decided to design [x] for our users; now go out in the field and do the research to confirm what we suspect."
Despite the above likelihood, if working with a real client, I would not shy away from sharing the discoveries and findings of my user research, no matter how awkward it may be. This - avoiding a solution the users didn't ask for and so don't care about - is what could potentially save a client lots of money down the line!
Having said that, if a client was firm that the solution had to be of a certain type (phone app, Website, etc.), despite my user research revealing that that's not even what users actually want, I'd still do my best to work with my client to create the best version of their product possible, so whoever used the product would not suffer from unnecessary UX problems.
