Walkie Doggie is an iOS based mobile application for dog owners. A user can find another dog owner who walks his/her dog around a similar route to share their dog-walking workload.
Team of 2 | 3 months | Sketch + Framer
My teammate and I first targeted dog owners who are not able to stay with their dogs during the day. 8 dog owners were recruited through snowball sampling for interviews and concept testing.
Finding: A Big Time Commitment
In our interviews, dog owners mentioned about time management as a common issue. Since they are always away from home during the day, they worry a lot that they don't have enough time playing with their dogs, taking them outside to exercise and paying attention to their health status.
Competitive Analysis
We found lots of existing products in pet toys and health tracking. In addition, none of our interviewees has invested money on tech toys, since their dogs are playing well with typical toys. However, the area of dog walking hasn't been tackled widely.
Dog owners consider the time spent on walking their dogs very important, because their dogs can pee and exercise only in an outdoor environment.
Status Quo
Most of our interviewees reach out to their friends or a dog walker when they are not able to walk their dogs. However, they are not satisfied with both approaches: friends are not always available and they thus owe their friends a favor; it is expensive to hire a dog walker and it is hard to tell if the walker is trustworthy.
Key Characteristics of Target Users
Dog owners who are
> Not at home for a long time during the day
> Too busy to have enough time walking their dogs
> Not willing to spend money on dog walkers
Profile
Daisy first signed up with her email. Afterwards, she uploaded a profile picture of her and her dog together. Later, Daisy drew her regular dog-walking routes and set walking time to the routes.
Partner
There were several partner-matching results according to the level of overlaps between their dog-walking routes.Daisy chose Andrea to view her bio and reviews. Daisy then sent out an invite to Andrea.
Message
Andrea accepted Daisy's invite and they scheduled a first meetup via in-app message to walk their dogs together in order to see if their dogs could get along together and if they'd like to move on with their partnership.
Calendar
Daisy and Andrea were satisfied with each other. They then scheduled their walking shifts in the calendar. When Daisy's shift is approaching, she will receive a reminder. She walks her dog and Andrea's dog during her shift. After the walk, Daisy can send a short report to Andrea about her dog via message.
We presented this version to 5 people to test the system flow. According to their feedback, we refined our design to the final version.
According to feedback from our flow testing, it's hard to understand “Start Time” and its relationship with routes. Therefore, we made the label of walking time more clear to understand.
According to feedback from our flow testing, the screen of scheduling shift was
- Hard to understand the idea by clicking profile pictures.
- Not obvious to them that it’s a “shared page” on which both can edit.
Therefore, we revised the screen to a list view.
According to feedback from our flow testing, dog owners would love to see more information, e.g. bio or reviews, to tell whether this owner and their dog will be a good fit. Therefore, we added a bio and review sections to the profile page.
Enjoy our product video above!
> Share workload with a trustworthy partner
> Your dogs can meet other friends and ensure enough exercise in order to keep them physically and mentally healthy
> Enjoy your additional time
We implemented some parts of interactions in Framer. Feel free to play with our prototype.