Encouraging dog adoption — a UX case study
By: Olivia Laboriel
Tags: Design Thinking, Dogs, User Experience, Case Study, Interaction Design

Developing empathy.

The responses from our survey gave us some important insights, such as:

Half of all respondents were looking for a particular breed when they were searching for their dog 65% of dog owners surveyed had adopted their dogs from a shelter.

I conducted street interviews, as well as context and expert interviews. Most of our street interviews turned up dog owners but they varied in their level of knowledge about getting a dog. Some had gotten dogs from shelters, others from friends or breeders. To gain further insight on the adoption process, I also interviewed individuals who had experience adopting dogs. I talked to them about the pains and gains of the process. They were able to explain some of the difficulties they encountered.

Key difficulties they mentioned were:

Going to a shelter without knowing beforehand what they have available

Guilt about passing by eager-looking pups

Not knowing enough about a dog’s history or temperament to feel ready to take it home

To guide our process from there, we developed a persona based on common themes in our surveys and interviews. There were multiple personas that could have come from our interviews, such as people that find a dog from a shelter or are given a dog by a friend without hesitation, but we wanted to focus on the more cautious user. Themes that emerged from this persona included a desire to have a dog for the benefit of children, concerns about finding the right fit, and competing demands on time. Most of these individuals were moms in their late thirties or early forties. From this research, we created Susan.

Susan is a working mother of three teenagers. She believes that having a dog is an important part of childhood because dogs teach responsibility and provide companionship. In short, Susan would like a family dog. Once we had an established persona, we developed the goals that she would have in using the site. Each goal was based on a concern, need or frustration of our persona.

Susan’s main goals were to:

Browse pets efficiently, to be educated Ensure the pet was a good match Process the adoption Access post-adoption resources.

Forming ideas.

These goals formed our user story map. The user story map turned out to be a vital step in our process. Previously, we’d planned to include a social media element to allow the user to connect with other dog parents. Our user story map made it clear that a social feature didn’t align with Susan’s goals. Susan wants a dog for her family, not so that she can network with new people. Additionally, Susan’s busy lifestyle makes it unlikely that she would have time or interest to engage in that way. By the end of user story mapping, the whole project felt very clear. I was confident that we were moving in the right direction.

The story map helped to develop a website that aligned with our persona.

My next step was to develop a site map. One of the main challenges we faced here was determining what features would be available to a guest user versus an account-holder. We wanted to prove the value of the site while still encouraging people to sign up. To address this, we determined that a full range of filters would only be available after sign-up. A guest user would also not have access to a matchmaker to aid their search, saved preferences, or “favorite” dogs.

We also conducted open and closed card sorts. This was particularly helpful in organizing service recommendations like vets and groomers, information about adoption, and blog posts. Overall, it seemed that our intended information architecture was easy for users to understand and organize. However, I noticed that users struggled to place the adoption paperwork feature. Looking back, this was the first indication that that feature didn’t fit, but I didn’t address it at the time.

Card sorts confirmed our proposed information architecture.

Wireframing.

Having created a thorough user story map, we moved on to wireframe sketches. A big challenge here was incorporating all the needed information into a clean-looking design. We approached this by using ample white space, even in our sketches. With that in mind, we transferred our drawings into Sketch and prepared a prototype. We presented our prototype for design review.

Reviewer feedback.

We received valuable feedback in the design review about our on-boarding. Reviewers wanted to see more questions about lifestyle in the sign up quiz. This feedback was valuable because before, we had focused questions more on the preferences about the dog. After the review, we added questions about time availability and children in the home. The issue of time came up in several interviews and our surveys as well. People often said they worried they wouldn’t have enough time to care for a puppy or a high-energy dog, so we made that a priority. Our surveys had also indicated that people were more wary of bringing home a shelter dog if they had children in their home. We wanted to make sure that we could address this by helping users to match with a dog that is good with kids.

New quiz questions added after design reviews.

UI.

From there, we split up to test and develop high fidelity designs individually. Before working on the high-fidelity, I performed user testing. In the initial prototype, we struggled with prioritizing education and adoption. Was the main call-to-action to look at dogs? Or did it need to be to learn about adoption and why puppy mills are unethical? To answer this question, I started the user tests by opening to the homepage and asking the users, “Where would you go from here?” All of the users said that they wanted to start browsing dogs immediately. I felt that that goal aligned with our persona’s goals as well, so I decided to give the priority to browsing dogs rather than education. The main call-to-action became “Take our puppy finder quiz!”, with the top priority on the homepage given to dog’s profiles.

Two possible calls-to-action for the homepage.

As I continued testing, I asked people to perform basic tasks:

Signing up Logging in Adding a dog to their favorites

These were simple tasks, but they helped me to identify if the flow of the website was intuitive. For example, I tested many iterations with the search icon in different places. I found through these tests that the most natural place was in the top navigation.

The most challenging part of the high fidelity designs was the dog profile page. I wanted to include all of the necessary information in a way that the user could quickly grasp. I also wanted to include calls-to-action and give priority to photos.