Onboarding

A series of questions asking people information about their dogs, their experience in dog training, and training goals.  

Personalized Training Courses

A personalized sequence of easy-to-follow video tutorials- so you know exactly what to watch and teach your dog next.

Performance Tracking

A performance tracking dashboard that allows you to track your dog’s learning progress and builds confidence in yourself as the owner.

Chat with Community & Trainers

A chat feature to connect you with the online dog owner community to share your dog videos. Users can unlock personal chat with certified dog trainers after subscribing to the service.

🌟 Inspiration

Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 23 million American households have acquired a pet, and 90% of them are dogs. Recent research shows that more than half of new owners of pandemic dogs are first-time owners.

Since Shruti has a dog herself, she felt as well based on personal experience, that there still doesn’t exist a type of service that could help her know what to teach and train her dog. It’s a lot of learning on your own and figuring things out based on talking to other owners, and spending countless time on the Internet. As a group, we were interested in coming up with a service that could cut a lot of the struggle finding what to teach, and figuring it out how to teach it, in order to raise the perfect pupper.

📝 Explore & Research

What are the unmet needs of new dog owners?

What are the challenges in dog raising and training?

Through talking with dog owners at the dog park and conducting 5 directed storytelling sessions with friends and family members with dogs, we were enlightened about their training experiences, problems they are facing, and experiences in visiting the vet. These categories would help us narrow down some of the digital service features.

Field Research

To gain some insights and get out into the field, we went to Frick Park on a Sunday evening to validate our initial ideas with dog owners. The validation was conducted in a format of semi-structured interviews, in which we prompted what they would do in different stages of training their dogs.  

User Interviews

Our team conducted 5 semi-structured interviews to better understand the challenges in dog raising and training.

Our participants were friends and family members with dogs. Participants discussed how they got their puppy, how they went about feeding,  beginning training, and reacting during different situations. Notes from the interviews were analyzed using affinity mapping in Miro.

Initial Screens

We sketched initial mobile screens and conducted a feedback session with peers and professors. I drew the onboarding screens that ask first-time users a series of questions about their dogs and their experience in dog training.   

MVP1 Validation

We used Wizard of Oz to validate MVP1 with dog owners. From the feedback, we learned that users value a clear pathway in dog training – where to start, the progress, and when to move on. Another insight was that people value customized training content based on the dog’s age, breed, obedience level, etc.  

Additionally, we learned the challenges as first-time dog owners. Another feedback was the current scope seems too big for an MVP. We planned to narrow down our target users and focus on critical features that could differentiate our service from existing dog training apps.

Hand Sketches

Before prototyping mobile screens, we did a second round of low-fidelity sketches to explore user flow and key screens of the proposed dog training app. This approach allowed us quickly work out ideas and discuss user flow within our group.

MVP2 Validation

We applied the parallel prototyping method in developing MVP2 to try out more design ideas. To evaluate MVP2, we conducted user testing sessions with three interview participants. We showed our wireframes, walked them through user flows, and asked for feedback and opinions.

  We learned that:

• Participants like how they can track the dog’s training progress. The “Progress” screen was said to be informative and easy to understand.

• Participants value the feature of rating dog’s performance after completing each training session.

• There was confusion about wordings on several pages.

• There was a strong interest in interacting with other dog owners through the app to share tips.  

Visual Style

After applying a color system of teal blue to represent learning and education, we added brighter colors like yellow and orange as a contrast to make the UI more colorful and fun.

🎞️ Movie Making

To plan our movie, we first wrote a script, then used still images to sketch out the scenes that work with the narrative, and prepared a movie sketch as a storytelling medium. Through in-class critique session, we learned that:

• Make sure it doesn’t feel like two ads when we only intended to show two different user scenarios

• Show how users will interact with our app screens

• Revise the movie script to be more engaging  

final movie

🎨 Poster Design

Poster Version 1
In the first version, we chose to showcase the main screens and then show four icons at the bottom to simply describe the core app features.

Poster Version 2
For our second version, we cut the icons at the bottom to talk only about 3 core ones, and bulleted simply what it does. The biggest phone would feature an exciting moment, like when a training session has been completed.

Final Poster
This ended up being our final printed poster. We used the confetti shapes to be bright and playful and to attract a viewer’s eye to something that makes them feel good, like a celebration.