Hackathon Project: PawCity, Pet Parenting, and Community
Role UX Designer, UX Researcher
In September 2021, I participated as a UX designer in a three day hackathon in which I was assigned to a team of two software engineers, three fellow UX designers, and two data scientists in order to create a functioning web app in a short amount of time. In this intensive sprint, we collaborated as a cross-functional team to uncover and solve pain points in the broad world of “pet services”, which was the given prompt.
Through our research, we discovered that building a trustful and secure local community is essential to alleviating the challenges of pet parenting. For example, having a reliable community of fellow pet parents can help to organically relieve anxiety regarding making sure one’s pet is taking care of while one is away. So our team we came together to deliver an MVP of a location-based community building mobile app for pet parents.
I learned a great deal in this hackathon. In particular, it was great practice to be able to work with developers and data scientists to gain a cross-functional picture of building a product.
The hackathon, organized by General Assembly, was one of the most challenging sprints I’ve participated in. One of the challenges was navigating collaboration with a team of nine who I had never met before. I was fortunate to have had a very congenial and motivated group. We were able to move forward from the start in a professional and systematic way.
User Research: Toward an understanding of pain points in pet parenting
Even though we only had 72 hours to create a functioning app, we knew that performing user research would nonetheless critical. So while our engineers set to work constructing the back end of our future MVP, we sent out a survey, from which we got 35 responses, and conducted five user interviews in order to dig deeper into the world of pet parenting and discover problem trends. Our data scientists also dove into market research. We learned that many more people in the U.S.A. acquired pets during 2020 compared to prior to the pandemic, yet adoption of pet related applications remains relatively low considering the size of the industry. Our user research confirmed as much.
Our survey yielded some interesting results from 35 respondents, most of whom are dog owners. The vast majority of the respondents commented that the hardest aspect of pet parenting was making sure their pets are well taken care of while they are away.
79% of respondents said they would prefer to leave their pet with family or friends as opposed to someone they found through a service.
Of the respondents who do use paid pet sitting services, such as boarding facilities, only 45% percent said they might trust a pet sitter found through an app.
80% of respondents said they don’t use pet-related apps at all.
78% of survey respondents stated that they socialize their pets simply by taking walks outside. 41% said that they socialize their pet(s) through pet playdates or meetup groups.
Our user interviews revealed similar trends that confirmed some of our survey results.
All of the interviewees said they experience anxiety regarding leaving their pets alone at home and that they would be reluctant to trust their pets with a stranger, even if that person had many positive reviews on Rover or Wag.
Almost all of the interviewees said they socialize their pet through informal walks, playdates, and meetup groups. Several interviewees said they would probably use digital applications for playdates and pet meetups more if there was an easy way to do so. One interviewee said, “I wish there was an easier way to meet and coordinate with pet parents in my area.”
An overarching theme that permeated both the interviews and the survey results was the issue of community trust, which could be summed up by this quote from one of the interviewees: “We have people in our community that can be trusted to take care of our animals. It’s nice to know that we have that kind of support”.
We concluded that trust through community is one of the most effective ways to alleviate anxiety experienced when pet parents are away from their pets. Community is also essential to pet socialization. While services such as Rover and Wag solve the problem of convenience regarding pet sitting, they are less effective in terms of building community trust. Particularly at a time during the pandemic when communities are fractured, yet many more people have pets, there need to be product solutions that nurture community.
Considering our research synthesis, our UX team developed a persona we named Meg and constructed the following problem statement:
Rather than creating another pet sitting app, we wanted to leverage this idea of community trust. We set to work designing PawCity, the app that helps Meg create a trustful and secure community.
Designing a Solution
With this idea of a community pet app in mind, we conducted several design studios to flesh out the visual concept of the app’s dashboard. After a handful of sketching rounds, we arrived at a user flow that we could create into a hi fidelity mockup with the limited time that we had. Within the flow, meg can create events, join events crated by other users, and post and interact with content in a simple newsfeed. Meg can easily create and explore pet related events in a specified radius of her location.
“Events” could include a wide range of use cases, such as:
Meg discovers on the PawCity app that there is a weekly dog play and walk meetup in her neighborhood. She is able to join the event and chat with other participants in the group. She connects with other human participants and friendly dogs in person and organically builds a community of people with whom she would trust to leave her dog while she’s away.
Meg just got home late in the evening and needs to walk her dog, but she doesn’t want to walk alone. So she opens the PawCity app and sees that her neighbor and friend has posted that she’s walking her dog in 15 mins and is open to others joining.
By the time we created the first iterations of wireframe mockups, our engineers had set up the code frameworks necessary to proceed with developing the rest of the product demo. They are able to take our mockup samples and write the front end code accordingly. Our engineers used a MERN stack to write out a monolithic full-stack application and React to write the front end code. The fully developed product demo, which is in production, will be added to this case study.
Next Steps
The hackathon was a fantastic learning experience. It was a great way to gain more practice working with developers, other designers, and data scientists. There is only so much we could accomplish in a three day sprint, but we did a lot for that amount of time. Below are some of the next steps we would take with more time.
Development
Complete Authentication
Build out data models for users, events, etc.
Incorporate web services to implement our core features
Data Science
Create AI algorithms to analyze user preference, and build marketing strategy to orient business decision making
Foster community connections by developing community networks
Secure user information
User Experience
Conduct more user research and a thorough Competitive and Comparative Analysis
Usability Testing
Build out more user flows and features