Note: this project started as research-focused, and I later took it on as a personal challenge to develop design concepts from our research insight. All screen assets in this piece are my work.
Problem
New cat adopters go through a period with trial and errors before they learn how to care for their new friend.
Originating in Japan, cat cafes have been booming in the U.S. in recent years. Many cafes work with animal rescue to bring in cat residents, and provide a relaxing environment to connect them with potential adopters visiting the cafe.
However, the support from cat cafes ends once the new adopter picks up the cat, and it's challenging for the adopters to ramp up with knowledge they need on their own.
Solution
Kat Kit is a mobile app that utilizes a system of data points to provide an integrated post-adoption experience for the adopters. It keeps adopters informed through real-time health data captured by IoT sensors and enables them to make informed decisions with historical input by previous caregivers.
Feature 1: Real-time Health Tracking & Tailored Advice
Kat Kit works with tracking device to keep cat parents informed of possible abnormal behaviors and conditions and can catch possible health issues that are less visible.
Feature 2: Activity History
Kat Kit generates report using the data it has collected to analyze patterns, and the history can allow cat parents to uncover and understand what’s happening when they are absent.
Feature 3: Find Local Experts & Schedule Appointments
Users can sort through local experts who are able to help with cats’ health issues, and the system leverages users’ personal networks to provide better matches between them and vets – friends in real life can recommend experts online, giving users higher confidence.
Feature 4: Cat Profile
Kat Kit encourages care givers involved in the pre-adoption stage to input information specific to each cat (e.g. personalities, allergies, etc.) and provides new cat parents with a historical perspective.
Feature 5: Meal Planning
Kat Kit uses the cat’s data to provide appropriate recommendations for next steps, supporting cat parents and providing with cats with the best possible nutrition as they grow.
Feature 6: Nutrition Analysis
The built-in scanner reads product information stored in product barcode and compares it with historical data obtained from previous care givers to help cat parents sort through various products and efficiently reach a decision.
Feature 7: Chatbot
The chatbot pulls resources from the internet and provide personalized suggestions according to historical data and information specific to each cat.
Research & Scoping
Understanding our domain and users
Come up with a mobile solution to address the needs in the pet adoption domain.
Given this open-ended prompt, we ran with our research. We learned that many working professionals are starting to adopt cats for a sense of companionship. To understand the landscape, we leveraged online literature for a closer look at the general adoption process and parties involved.
We also paid visits to an animal rescue and the cat cafe to immerse ourselves in the environments cats lived in before finding a new home. We conducted interviews with various key players in the cat adoption space – cat cafe staff, volunteers and adoption counselor from Animal shelter, as well as current and potential adopters.
From these conversations, we created two detailed service blueprints:
We found that opportunities clustered around the post-adoption stage, so that became the focus for this project. We then reframed the problem statement:
How might we provide ongoing support for new cat adopters?
Concept Generation
We created personas to represent the major stakeholders (adopters, business owner, cat cafe staff), focusing on their respective high-level needs and pain points.
We also wrote up user stories and created storyboards to test with our audience.
Design Goals
We conducted 15 speed-dating sessions with cat adopters to learn about the usefulness of our design concepts. Ultimately, our product should enable adopters to better take care of their cats. Specifically, I identified a few design goals:
1. Our product should help adopters find relevant information quickly.
A common pain point for new adopters is information overload. While there is a multitude of resources on-and-offline, adopters have to manually sort through them. This is often draining and inefficient, and adopters need a way to identify what is useful for the cats that they have adopted.
2. Our product should be helpful in moments of crisis.
Adopters often lack the knowledge and resource when they first bring the cats home. It's even more stressful when they find out about an underlying issue in their cats and don’t know how to deal with it.
3. Our product should make it easy to seek outside support.
A number of adopters mentioned it’s important to them that the other caregivers (such as vet and pet stores) are reliable. They often seek recommendations from their personal network when choosing a care giver because they find them more authentic and trustworthy.
Concept Development
I first shared these lo-fi designs in the form of feature walkthrough and play-tests. These sessions allowed me to align with users and identify the most valuable features.
