PetPad

User Interviews

Objective

1. Why do dog owners struggle with the elimination diet or other chronic health condition?

2. Who is struggling?

3. What are the main factors causing this?

4. How are people currently doing this?

5. What are alternatives or solutions available to solve this problem?

Methods

• Screener Survey

• Six 30-minute semi-structured interviews

Finding: The most common pain points are...

• • Owner compliance is the biggest problem for diet consistency

  • Benefits are typically long-term. Lack of guaranteed short-term benefits can discourage adherence to diet

  • Lack of belief in the vet’s prescriptive diet

  • Lack education in health science, believing in over-the-counter solutions, like unregulated labels of “hypoallergenic” foods or other miracle cures

  • Lack of time to pay attention to dog all day

  • Other people would feed dog prohibited foods

How did we address these issues?

The Solution: A free-to-use, shared digital journal to log medical information that also provides vetted, accessible, and personalized information. Features include:

✔️ Log entries pertaining to dog health, training, and more

✔️ Flag and detect problems and provide integrated call-to-action

✔️ See history of all entries

✔️ Share information with contacts

✔️ Sync information with other caretakers also using the app

Low-fidelity Wireframes & Usability Study

I created an interactive paper prototype using pencil, paper, and Marvel App. After conducting one round of user research on five testers, I implemented a few changes as I created the wireflows on Figma.

💡 Finding: Users wanted a way to sort through entries.

🛠️ Recommendation: I provided a filter (intending to have options for  date range, urgency, and other properties).

💡 Finding: Users did not understand the meaning of “Score”.

🛠️ Recommendation: I added a definition as a tooltip and put it on a scale from “Dry” to “Wet” to make it more intuitive to understand.

Then I built two versions of hi-fi prototypes, each followed by a round of testing, consisting of task-based user interviews and mission-based Maze.co studies. Following are examples of common findings in each iteration.

💡 Finding: Users thought the purposes of the “Home” and “History” pages were too similar.

🛠️ Recommendation: I made the “Home” page into a dashboard with additional information.

💡 Finding: Users were alarmed by the dialog upon selection of “white spots” in dog stool.

🛠️ Recommendation: I changed it to a lower priority message UI component (a banner), allowing user to either ignore or interact with it.

💡 Finding: Users did not immediately understand how to “edit” the list of entries on the “Add Entry” page.

🛠️ Recommendation: Make a more intuitive option for users to “Add Custom Entry”, “Reorder”, or “Remove” entries from the “Add Entry” page.

💡 Finding: Users try to click dog’s individual profile picture to access their records or log an entry.

🛠️ Recommendation: Have profile pic selection open a menu with “Select, Add Entry, View History”.