Project: Tom's Pet Health Center
Scope: Product strategy, Web Design, UX Research
Tools: Adobe XD, Miro, WebAIM
Duration: Feb 2022 (3 weeks)
Overview
Value Proposition
Tom's Pet Health Center offers comprehensive services for pets. The goal of the project is to design a website which makes the pet care process easier, faster, and more convenient. We achieve this by providing a broad range of services through the website, accessible through a simple and intuitive interface.
Why Design
Many people have pets in America, and most pet owners consider their pets to be family members. When they need care, they want it to be provided in a professional and trustworthy manner. Unfortunately, the process can often be too complicated and time consuming. Pet owners often must use several different providers to find the help their pets need.
Pain Point
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Most pet care providers offer only one main service. The pet owner must go to several different places to find all the help they need.
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The pet owner needs to make an appointment for each session.
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The pet owner usually must wait at least a week to see a veterinarian.
Features overview
Operation
Core feature - Pet owners can access several different services for their pets, all on one website.
Services
Core feature #1 - Pet owners can talk to a veterinarian directly through Vet Chat, without the need for a long wait.
Core feature #2 - Pet owners only need to make an appointment for the primary purpose, and related appointments will be generated automatically.
Timeline
The first week
Research & Define
The second week
Analyze & Ideate
The Third week
Design & Refine
Research
Method
Questionnaire
We designed a short questionnaire to help us better understand our potential users from a quantitative aspect. Our goal is to learn:
who
Who are users ?
How
How do they take the pet caring process?
what
What are their challenges ?
User Interviews
We had remote interviews with 5 people to understand their stories – While the questionnaires helped us to define the pain points, the real stories provide an opportunity for us to establish empathy for our users, and help us to define potential use cases and experience flow.
Pet's behavior problems
Pet has minor behavioral problems which the owners want to understand and correct, as soon as they can.
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Pet's transportation problems
Pet has minor behavioral problems which the owners want to understand and correct, as soon as they can.
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Video chat with vet
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Pet owners don’t want to send their pet to emergency room unless necessary. But sometimes there is no choice, due to long wait times to see the normal veterinarian.
Findings
User Personas
I'm In our questionnaire, pet owners had different age levels and concerns. 67% of the participants were more concerned with how smooth and easy the whole process was, while 22% of the participants were concerned with how much time and money they spend. Therefore, we’ve decided to establish two user personas to define our potential users.
Use cases
Through a brainstorming session, we've categorized our use cases into three categories. Each category contains its own challenges.
Pets get very sick
What if the pet gets very sick on a weekend, and the pet owner doesn’t want to send the pet to the emergency room?
Pet has a small problem
Pet owners don’t have enough education to diagnose what the pet’s problem is, but it’s not a serious issue. What if the pet owners could talk to a veterinarian over video, instead of taking the pet to the pet clinic?
Pet services - grooming, boarding etc.
Pet owners want to board their pet, but all boarding facilities have vaccine requirements. What if the pet doesn’t have it, and the boarding facility doesn’t have a vaccine service? What if the boarding facility does not accept the pet because of the pet’s bad behaviors?
Challenges
Operational
1. Pet owners have to go to different places and make several appointments to achieve a goal.
2. Long wait times to see a vet.
3. It’s not worth it to take the pet to a clinic to address a problem.
Psychological
1. Pet owners don’t want to bring their pet to the emergency room because it’s very expensive.
2. Pet owners worry about the pet a lot, but they must wait to see a vet.
Convenience
1.Pet owners don’t have time to arrange everything for the pet if they have to be out of town soon.
2. Pet owner has to find a new boarding facility for the pet, because the previous facility won’t take the pet back due to the pet’s bad behaviors.
Design Principal
Seamless
The product should provide seamless connections across different departments.
Flexible
The product should provide a flexible system to fulfill all three categories of use cases mentioned above.
Simple
Keep it simple, so that users don't have to spend a great deal of effort to learn how to handle the service system.
Ideate
Analyze
Journey Mapping
To create a user journey map of Thomas’s experience using the site to help identify possible pain points and improvement opportunities. Thomas is a busy software developer who needs a boarding facility with a training program, and a full service pet health care website, because he wants an easier caring process for his pet.
Brainstorm
Using the journey map above, we sketched out wireframes as a team to explore concepts. We held whiteboard sessions to discuss the product features. The goal is to define design directions through a series of design critiques. We also kept a running list to track our discussions.
Here are some examples of our discussions
1. Why would pet owners choose the full service pet health center? Would it be easier for pet owners if a pet clinic or some pet service was closer to their home, even if it only provided a single primary service?
It’s always nice to have a pet service facility close by, but the full service pet health center is always better if the pet owner has a choice.
Scenario #1 pet owner needs to send their dog to a boarding facility.
Most boarding facilities have specific vaccine requirement. If the pet doesn’t have it, then the pet owner might need to take the pet to another place to get the vaccines. In this case, the location is not a main concern anymore. The full service pet health center will be more convenient.
Scenario #2 The pet has a serious problem
Not all pet clinics provide full range pet services. For instance, some of them perform surgeries. The pet will be transferred to another clinic if the pet needs a surgery.
2. Can we have lower prices? Half of the users care about price.
No, it’s hard to implement lower prices. The most important thing for us is to make sure that prices won’t be higher than others, for now.
The Sparks of Thoughts
Idea 1 More features
Most pet clinics don’t offer multi-language services,so it will be difficult for speakers of other languages.
Idea 2 pet training
Some pet boarding facilities don’t accept pets with bad behaviors. What if the facility could offer pet training services? Then, the pet’s bad behaviors won’t be a problem anymore.
“
Dad told me that he is going to have a business trip, and he will send me to a pet boarding place. I’m so excited that I will make friends there and have others I can play with! Everyone will like me.
”
“
I had an interview there. I’m so excited to meet friends there, but
people are afraid of me because I jump on people. I just want to play and snuggle, and show them that I like them. I failed the interview, and that place can not accept me. Dad and I are both very sad.
”
“
I'm What if the pet boarding place offers pet training services? The pet could take the class when the pet stays there. Then, the pet’s behaviors won’t be a problem anymore.
”
Idea 3 pet health insurance
Pet owners are often confused about how to get reimbursement from their pet health insurance. What if the pet health center works with the insurance company closely? Is it possible to make the reimbursement process smoother and faster?
Design
Plan
Proposed Experience Flow
Difficulty with pet health-related businesses which doesn't offer full services. That was a primary pain point for users, so we used that knowledge to create a sitemap. Our goal was to make things simple, clear and easy to use. We finalized our design into an sitemap for the team to clearly understand our design system.
Explore
Low-fidelity Exploration
Visualize the concept for further discussion and exploration.
Usability Study
I received feedback from my research about aspects such as the navigation bar, the home page, and page organization. I listened carefully to their feedback, and I implemented several suggestions to address user pain points.
Findings
During the checkout process, there wasn’t a clear way for users to buy prescription medication.
Users are confused about surgery appointments. Can surgery be scheduled directly, or is the appointment for a consultation?
Users feel uncomfortable about
paying for the vet chat when they
make an appointment.
