Paw Prints
Mobile App
All of your pets’ medical information, in one organized place for ease of mind and transferability, for wherever life takes you and your furry family members.
tREDD SMITH
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Our goal was to learn about the conveniences and pain points associated with pet owners keeping track of their animal’s medical records and health information.
Through user interviews we learned that pet owners often rely on memory to track their animals’ health concerns and they struggle to manage records between different veterinary providers. Pet owners having a cohesive record keeping system for their animal is essential for future veterinary diagnoses, but vets vary in how they distribute (or don’t distribute) after care summaries.
We designed, then tested, a solution that provides pet owners with a cohesive record keeping system for their animal’s medical documentation, all in one mobile app.
My Role: Project Manager / UX Designer & Researcher
Team Size: 3 people
Duration: 2 weeks
Project Status: Complete | January 2024
Tools Used: Figma, FigJam, Keynote, Google Surveys, Notion, Zeplin, Zoom
Methods Used: Business Model Canvas, Screener Survey, User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, User Persona, Journey Map, Feature Prioritization, Sketching & Design Studio, Style Guide, Wireframing, Prototyping, & Usability Testing
Problem Space
Any pet owner will tell you that their pet is more than just an animal - rather, they are important members of the family. Similar to their human counterparts, they have medical records that have to be organized in an effective way to monitor their health and coordinate treatment with veterinarians and other pet providers.
Our Challenge
We hypothesized that pet owners have a hard time keeping track of and staying organized with their animals' medical records and health information.
How can we support pet owners in monitoring their animals’ health to provide more precise medical guidance from veterinarians?
Our Solution
Paw Prints is a one stop shop for all things related to pet health, accessible via iOS mobile application.
The solution contains features that take that headache out of being a pet owner, by allowing users to:
Save and organize all forms of pet medical records
Manage appointments and prescriptions
Log health and behavior
Connect with providers
Enabling pet owners to keep a more organized and comprehensive list of the medical documents of their animals, allows for more convenience when needing to locate and share records with new providers. By having a more accurate overview of a pet’s medical history, veterinarians can make more accurate diagnoses.
Our Process
My team and I were able to create a animal medical record keeping system that solved pet owners’ biggest needs.
Here is the process we implemented to get there:
We Started With What We Believed
Based on initial business research and what we knew of being a pet owner, we hypothesized that pet owners have a hard time keeping track of and staying organized with their animals' medical records and health information.
How might we support pet owners in monitoring their animals’ health to provide more precise medical guidance from veterinarian?
This led us to wonder,
Research
Synthesize
Ideate
Deliver
Veterinarians typically send their recommended treatment/diagnosis via email.
Having to sift through old emails to remember a past diagnosis is an inefficient way of rediscovering that information.
Veterinarians often gather their basic understanding of an animals medical history based on what their owner remembers and communicates to them.
It is difficult for an animal’s owner to remember their entire medical history.
Pet owners may not remember important details related to their pets’ health when they visit the vet.
With a more through record of a pets medical history, vets could be able to make a more accurate diagnosis.
Our assumptions included:
We synthesized the qualitative data that we collected from user interviews and identified trends through affinity mapping. By refining and renaming the groupings, insights emerged.
Synthesizing What We Heard
Key Insights:
What We Heard From Users
Pet owners struggle to manage records between different vets because veterinarians vary in how they distribute after care summaries (some send digital documents, some send hardcopies)
Pet owners don’t like that they have to contact their vet to access to their pet’s records.
Pet owners often rely on memory to track their pet’s health concerns.
USER RESEARCH & SYNTHESIS
What We Set Out To Validate
The research team decided to explore the problem space in more detail to find out about the conveniences and pain-points associated with an owner keeping track of their pet’s medical records.
Validating Our Beliefs
To substantiate our assumptions, we conducted user research by interviewing 5 people. Interviewees consisted of individuals with pets who had recent veterinary visits, owned different types and quantities of animals, and had a need to monitor their veterinary appointments more frequently.
Who We Are Designing For
Based on the trends and insights that emerged from user interviews, a persona was created to humanize the data and focus in on our target audience for the upcoming design process.
Ryan embodies the overall user base that we examined. His goals, needs, and frustrations are indicative of what our target audience has shown us.
What Users Need
We deepened our understanding of Ryan by walking through, step by step, a typical experience would go through when taking his animal to a veterinary appointment. This allowed the team to see opportunities for design solutions.
Key Takeaways:
Design Solutions:
Ryan struggles to find important records when he needs them
Comprehensive pet medical record storage with search capacities
Photo-taking capacities for uploading physical documents
Coordinate with veterinarian offices to directly upload aftercare summaries and other documentation
Ryan’s medical files are not well organized and inaccessible
Ryan dislikes getting paper documentation for his vet aftercare summaries
Revised Problem Statement
The culmination of our research led to an updated problem area for us to keep centered around as we transitioned into design:
How might we enable pet owners to standardize, organize, and store their pets medical records?
Design Studio: Sketching & Concepting
We took the core insights that emerged from research to the design process. We first listed out features that would be the most valuable for our client and the target audience. Using two UX methods - a feature prioritization matrix and a MuShCoWo framework, we distilled our ideas down to the most critical ones for the MVP of the app.
With the features solidified, the design process kicked off with low-fidelity sketches in a collaborative design studio. This process helped the team quickly visualize core features in different ways, and we then converged on the best ones from each team-members pitch.
How It Performed
After modifying the design based on feedback from the first round of testing, we ran another round of usability testing with 5 new participants using the hi-fidelity prototype. We compared the results from both tests and calculated the deltas. It's data has proven that our latest iteration of the app can be used easily and intuitively.
What Changed (Mid-Fidelity → Hi-Fidelity)
In order to see if our product was intuitive to users, we went through two rounds of usability testing, with a total of 10 people. We gathered feedback on the mid-fidelity designs with the first 5 people, and then made revisions to address problem areas for our hi-fidelity prototype. By conducting more testing with 5 new users, we were able to see how our modifications performed between iterations.
Here are some key areas we improved from mid to high fidelity:
DESIGN
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
We then elaborated upon the sketches that worked best by digitizing them as mid-fidelity wireframes.
Key Takeaways:
In terms of overall success rate for all 3 tasks, the averages between mid and hi-fidelity remained the same, at an overall 66.6%.
However, the easiness rating for all three tasks largely increased, with the hi-fidelity score at 4.23/5 on the easiness scale.
Hi-Fidelity Wireframes
Our Prototype
Click around the prototype here
What’s Next for Paw Prints?
In creating the MVP for of our concept project in just two weeks, we had to prioritize the most important features that make the Paw Prints mobile app what it is at its core. Along the way, our team determined some opportunities for the next iteration of the platform.
Recommendations & Next Steps
Rename the tab bar icons to be more specific.
Change ‘Log’ to ‘Activity Log,’ and the ‘Medical History’ to Medical File to indicate that records would be kept there.
Change ‘Add Appointment’ to ‘Record Visit’ to remove the correlation ‘Appointment’ has with scheduling.
To distinguish the document upload methods, we suggest changing ‘Upload’ to ‘Upload file’.
Incorporate a ‘Share’ or 'Download’ button at the bottom of the visit summary. This feature would save all visit details, as well as any files to a PDF.
Implement recommended design changes and re-run usability testing to validate.
Reflection
This project is one that I have thought about for a long time. As a pet owner of a 6 year old Labrador retriever mix named Rocky (shown in the prototype), who has had a number of health issues since I rescued him as a 6 month old stray, I have personally experienced many issues within the current record distribution systems in the veterinary business. By bouncing questions off of interviewees it appeared to both myself and my teammates, that we are not the only one who finds current systems in place inefficient.
This project was a fun way of digging deeper into the veterinary medical record industry, learning from other pet owners about their frustrations within it, and for finding innovative ways of making that experience better for users.
Who Would Build This?
When beginning this project, my team and I wanted to create a platform that could standalone on its own but could also better meet its potential as a sub-brand of an existing company. The company that we had in mind was Chewy. A main reason for this is because Chewy is a leading brand in the pet e-commerce industry and they already have an open line of communication with veterinarians (for ex: customers place a medication order through their website, the order gets sent to the customer’s veterinarian, and after approval the prescription gets filled and shipped). In future iterations of the platform, our team can foresee this platform as having a back-end for veterinarians to upload medical documents directly, removing the need for users to need to manually upload after-care documentation.
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