Case study: Improving user experience by enhancing personalization
By: Alison Singer
Tags: UX Design, Case Study, User Experience, UI Design, Redesign

A summary of UX pain points and suggested solutions for the PETKIT app.

Our lives are busy: even though I now work from home, I am in meetings all day. I recently purchased the PETKIT Fresh Element Mini, a smart, automatic pet feeder for my cat so that he may eat on time, no matter what my day brings. While I am satisfied with the physical product, from a UX standpoint, I am disappointed with the confusing and impersonal user experience of the PETKIT app. As a UX designer, I knew that PETKIT could do better. In the following case study, I break down some pain points and some possible solutions to improving the PETKIT app.

User personalization is key

Upon signing up for the app I was asked a series of questions about my pet including breed, gender, age, weight, food, and love experience. These questions could be helpful, but the app does not use my answers to personalize my experience. Many people [including myself] think of their pets as their children, so a little bit of pet profile personalization could go a long way in customer engagement.

Quick Fix:

After collecting answers to its onboarding questions the app created a generic picture of a cat for my profile. This image looked nothing like my cat. Instead of using a generic avatar, the app might offer users ways to customize the image, thereby strengthening emotional connections to the app and the product. Users ought to feel they are doing something good for their pet by purchasing PETKIT products and using the app. A personalized user experience will make the app more convenient and useful resulting in more engagement and brand loyalty.

Another Quick Fix:

Even after an extensive onboarding process, the app makes assumptions later in the application. If I click “walk a pet” it gives me the prompt “please setup your daily walking time with your dog”. This prompt does not consider users who walk their cats. If PETKIT wants to leave the “walk” option just for dog owners then it should be removed from the dashboard of cat owners. If I will never click this button then there is no reason why it should take up so much space on my screen.

Clock Confusion

The app does a good job giving an option to change unit conversions based on where you live: Metric/British and Celsius/Fahrenheit. But what it doesn’t offer is a 12-hour vs 24-hour clock option. This app uses a combination of both the 12-hour and the 24-hour clock. When going to edit a feeding plan it uses the 12-hour clock. But when the plan is saved it reverts to a 24-hour clock and users have to convert the hours to a 12-hour time in their heads.

Quick fix:

Allow users to choose between the 12-hour and 24-hour clock in the unit conversion settings. This will lead to less confusion and time wasted trying to convert the 24-hour clock to the 12- hour time. Resulting in more satisfied customers.

Too many clicks, Too much time

Another major UX oversite is the actual process of setting my pet’s schedule, which is the main reason why I purchased the product and downloaded the application. Feeding times or feeding amounts may need to be changed for various reasons. I like to change the time on the weekends so I can sleep in and my pet isn’t bothering me for food. My last three attempts to change the feeding schedule have averaged 10 minutes, which is a lot of time spent on the simple task of changing the feeding time from 9 am to 8 am.

This task takes so long because after opening the app, it takes 9 clicks to reset the time of feeding; 7 of those clicks are spent just getting to the screen to change the time and 2 are spent changing the time and saving.

Quick fix:

Once opening the app and clicking the feeding device, a feeding schedule appears that breaks down the meals. Unfortunately, you are unable to change the meal settings on this screen. Instead, you must travel 4 screens and 5 clicks just to get to the screen that lets you adjust the feeding preferences. If the app would let users just change the time/ amount of food right at that first instance it would eliminate multiple taps and save users a good amount of time.

Hierarchy of Buttons

My last issue with the app is the large green ‘delete’ button. Because of its size and enhanced color, the ‘delete’ button is much more prominent than the ‘save’ button. When users are done editing the feeding schedule, they need to save, not delete. I personally click the “delete” button often and have to start the whole process over.

Quick fix.

Switching the save button with the delete button positions and sizes will make the process more intuitive and streamlined for the user. Making their usage time in the app shorter and more pleasurable.

Pets are truly our best friends, and by implementing some simple UX fixes to their app, PETKIT could increase customer engagement and desirability to purchase more of their products.