<aside> 🔖 In this free time, I try to challenge myself by working on a UX Case from the uxchallenge.co website and this time I chose the case "When pets are home alone".
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Pet owners certainly want to interact often or always with their pets. However, they still have to leave the house to go to work, travel and even run errands that are quite long and require them to leave their pets alone at home. So, how can I make these pet owners not have to worry about their beloved pets when they are not at home?
In this case study, I will focus on dogs and cats, although there may be other types of pets. I took this into consideration based on the habits and ways of caring for different pets and dogs and cats which are the pets most popular with pet owners.
When pet owners have to leave the house, it is not uncommon for them to feel reluctant to leave their pets behind. Maybe those who don't have pets will only worry about home security, but for pet owners, this is not the case. Apart from the things mentioned previously, they also worry when they leave their pets alone at home. Often in their minds, "Is my cat not hungry?", "Is my dog lonely?", and other things.
So in this case study I assume 2 possibilities that worry pet owners, namely:
In the initial stage before conducting research, I made a research plan which was categorized as follows:
Research Goals
Research Areas
Research Tools
Before designing, I had to prove my assumptions through a research process first to find out whether the problems previously assumed were felt by pet owners.
I am well aware that if assumptions alone are not enough, it is possible that the difficulties or pain points felt by other animal owners are not the same as what I feel.
Therefore, I created an online survey containing questions about this case study.
47 respondents filled out this survey, and it was confirmed that all of them had pets in their homes.
From the survey results received, the majority of respondents have cats as their pets (87.2%). Apart from that, some have dogs (8.5%), hedgehogs; cats; birds; turtles (2.1%), and cats; and dogs (2.1%) as pets in their homes.
After that, I tried asking questions about their relationship with their pets using a linear scale. The result was that 31 respondents (66%) felt very close to their pets, while 12 respondents (25.5%) felt quite close, and 4 respondents (8.5%) felt not close to their pets. From these results, it can be concluded that the majority of respondents feel very close to their pets.
So, do pet owners feel the same difficulties as me?
To answer this question, I asked it in the same survey. As a result, the majority of respondents often leave their pets at home (57.4%), while others rarely (40.4%) to never (2.1%) leave their pets at home.
The reasons they leave their pets alone at home vary. From having to go to work to going on holiday.
In this survey, I also asked what concerns they had when leaving their pets at home. The majority of respondents (48.9%) felt worried if the food they were given was not enough, and 23.4% were worried that their pets would feel lonely.
Next, how do they interact with their pets at home? There were various answers that respondents gave, but the majority (40.4%) asked relatives or neighbors to check their houses. Apart from that, there are also many (31.9%) who don't do anything because there is no platform that can help them.
From the survey results above, there are several pain points for users that make them worry and cannot interact with their pets at home. I also concluded that the platform/application for pet owners with their pets must:
Syahda and Feby are personas depicted in in-depth interviews who love and consider their pets as members of their own family.
This section focuses on presenting an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of competitors to see the differences in each application which is the foundation for improvising the features that are created later.
The following are the results of the Competitive Analysis:
In this section, I divide it into 2 flows, namely:
This flow is intended to show the entire menu provided and available in the application, starting from Entry, Splash, Onboarding, Sign In, to Home, My Pets, Orders, Community, Profile, and Notification.
In this flow, I added the features 'Lost' (to search for lost pets), 'Adopt' (to adopt pets), and 'Mating' (to mate pets) to provide more experience for pet owners.