Overview
​Pet adoption is an exciting and rewarding experience for both pets and their new owners. However, finding the right pet can be a challenge, and meeting the prospective pet in person is often the most critical part of the adoption process. Adoption events are a popular way for potential adopters to meet adoptable pets and find their perfect match. These events provide an opportunity for pets to showcase their personalities, interact with potential adopters, and hopefully find their forever homes.
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Problem
Despite the popularity of adoption events, locating them can be difficult. Currently, there is no centralized location where individuals can find information about upcoming events in their area. This makes it challenging for people who are interested in adopting a pet to identify adoption events that are happening nearby. For example, an adopter in the Tampa Bay Area would need to search all of these sources to find events:
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Petfinder
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The Petco Foundation
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Petsmart
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Pinellas County Animal Services
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Hillsbourough County Animal Services
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Pasco County Animal Services
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Manatee County Animal Services
As well as, Social media accounts and /or websites of
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Multiple breed specific rescues
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Multiple species specific rescues
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Multiple small and mid size non specific rescues
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Adopters need a way to easily locate in-person adoption events.
Rescues need a tool to advertise events and connect with a larger number of potential adopters and volunteers .
Solution
Create one trusted, unified resource, allowing pets and people to connect and increase successful adoptions for rescue animals of all types. Pick Me is a mobile app that makes it easy for individuals to locate pet adoption events in their area. The app provides a comprehensive list of upcoming adoption events, along with detailed information about the event, including location, date, and time. Users can filter events by location, date, and type of pet, making it easy to find the events that are most relevant to their needs. Additionally, the app includes features that allow users to volunteer at adoption events and support pet rescue organizations, making it a one-stop-shop for all things related to pet adoption.
Visual Exploration
To target appeal and identity, past and future adopters as well as, rescue staff were canvassed and shown multiple mood boards.
A carnival inspired tile that embraced bright colors and a fun, playful aesthetic resonated with an 80% majority.
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To refine the direction further, returning to peers and users, three style tiles further exploring the gained insights were tested.
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The popular style was this brightly colored cool palette showcasing happy family interactions and whimsical graphics, with large, easy to read UI. For the final color palette the blue was removed and saturation lowered slightly.
Adopters are excited, enthusiastic and looking for their new pet to bring fun and love into their lives. Going forward, the design should emulate that fun and excitement. To ensure the user's desired experience, I created three design principles as a standard for future design decisions.
Bright, fun color
palette & UI
Friendly, personable tone & voice
Playful graffics & images
Logo Design
Logo development occurred through ideation and testing processes as in the previous style tiles. From that feedback a final three designs emerged
Playing on emotion, the “I” as a paw raised, is as if the pet is vying for attention.
Simple and clean, it places a virtual “stamp” on decisiveness and action.
Ultimately, the "two paws" mark was a clear choice. It is simple and portrays the subject matter clearly. It speaks to most adopters and is versatile for color and texture variations. The font is a playful but bold, KonTiki JF.
Implementing the Design
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Wirefames
Low fidelity sketches produced layout app functionality and mid-fidelity mapped out three critical roles:
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For rescues and organizations to register events and market the events through social media.
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For Adopters to find events, set personalized searches and reminders as well as share on social media and communicate with event hosts.
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To further education and volunteer recruitment.
Translating the sketches into medium fidelity wire frames for prototyping and testing, allowed any gaps and navigation difficulties in the user flows to be discovered and corrected, before moving to high fidelity prototyping.
Prototyping
Applying the design direction and principles to the wireframes I produced a High Fidelity, clickable prototype of the "search an event" user flow. This flow allows the user to search by location or zip code and customize the search distance.
Additionally, the user can preset alerts for events in a future time frame again, with a customizable search.
View the prototype
Marketing & Style Guide
In order to promote the app and encourage user adoption, I developed a landing page with a clear call-to-action that aims to drive user engagement and downloads. To ensure consistency in branding across various marketing channels, I also established a Style Guide for future design applications, media, and marketing updates. See the style guide here.
Impact
This application and its potential impact is a prime example of how design and function can improve our world and the lives of those around us, even the four-legged, scaled and winged ones. With a powerful tool to drive adoptions and voluteer efforts, the work of non profit animal rescues can be amplified and more productive saving lives.