FUR-EVER by ResPAWnsive Inc.
A responsive digital platform that can help animals find a fur-ever home and people find a loving companion.
Overview
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Summary
Conducted rapid research in order to understand and improve a user’s cat adoption journey from an emotional perspective.
Since this was a 4-week sprint, we decided to narrow our scope to browsing cats online, picking favorites, visiting the shelter, and making an adoption decision.
Our solution consisted of high-fidelity responsive mobile and desktop prototypes with innovative features that enable an on-the-go user to browse, favorite, or adopt cats at home, on the phone in their car, or at the shelter.
Informed by our research, we also added special features to alleviate certain emotional stressors users experience throughout the adoption process.
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My Role
Lead UX Researcher
Led directed storytelling interviews with participants that have been through the cat adoption process.
Led contextual inquiry at a local animal shelter and performed intercept interviews with volunteers and potential pet parents.
Collaborated with design team to synthesize user research into prototypes for evaluative research.
Conducted think-alouds for usability testing with lo-fi prototypes.
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Core Methods
🏠 Contextual Inquiry
Directed Storytelling
Experiential Observations
Intercept Interviews
✏️ Storyboarding
💻 Prototyping & Usability Testing
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The Team
Problem Space
The cat adoption process is usually a time-consuming process and an emotional rollercoaster for most users as adopting and then taking care of a cat is a huge responsibility and going through those initial stages can be stressful. The potential pet parent goes through the stages of looking for cats and shelters online, visiting shelters and working with the staff to get to know the cats, making a decision of whether to adopt, and any final tasks before taking the cat to their new forever home.
“How might we understand and improve this overall journey to mitigate some of the stress and frustration users experience throughout this process?”
Our Rapid Research Process
listen & understand ➡️ experience & empathize ➡️ synthesize ➡️ ideate ➡️ test
Methods
Contextual Inquiry
Directed Storytelling
Our Process:
Our team chose to use a research method of directed storytelling to understand the context of the cat adoption journey each of our three participants took. We created an interview guide that combined questions for directed storytelling and then semi-structured interview style follow-up questions. We asked the participants to tell us about their cat adoption experiences in a story-telling format from start to finish and stop to also explain their emotional state at each event. We added insights and observations from our interview notes onto stickies and did some affinity diagramming. We then used insights gleaned from the affinity diagramming exercise to create individual journey maps for each participant and then a final, combined customer journey map.
About the participants & why we talked to them:
Three participants possessing varied experience with one or more of the following:
Volunteering at a pet shelter
Fostering cats
Adopting cats
Owner of multiple cats, kittens, bonded pairs, and/or siblings
Long emotional adoption experience
Tried different services such as pet stores, cat cafes, and animal shelters
Though each person in our team had been through the pet adoption process ourselves, we still needed to interview other users to understand their specific and unique experiences. We also learned that it is important to understand emotions, nuances, and specific context surrounding the adoption journey as that is where the true insights lie.
An unexpected discovery:
🔍 Our most surprising discovery in terms of findings from user interviews was that users like to keep up with a cat’s adoption status even after deciding not to adopt the cat because they feel guilty or would like to care for the cat in ways other than adopting.
👤 “When I chose not to adopt a cat with health issues due to my personal financial reasons, I felt guilty so I kept up with their adoption status on the website and was relieved and happy when I saw they were adopted two weeks later.”
- Interview Participant
What we learned:
🔍 Adopters like to know what cats a shelter has before committing to a visit. Most websites serve this purpose well but need to be up-to-date.
👤 “I was looking for a bonded pair specifically so it was helpful to see in advance if there were any available at a shelter that day before I made the long trip.”
🔍 Appearance, personality, and health are the most important factors in deciding whether or not to adopt a cat. Rich media or stories help more in understanding this than basic descriptions. It is important to know the health of a potential pet before adopting it. Even so, adopters are sometimes surprised by conditions the shelter is not aware of either.
👤 “It is important to me that the cat is affectionate, playful, cute, and doesn’t have any medical issues.”
🔍 Playtime is the final step in determining whether or not to adopt a cat, with gut feeling helping to gauge if the cat’s personality fits with their lifestyle and home.
👤 “I had a good feeling about a cat but once I spent an hour playing with it, I realized the cat was not very friendly.”
Experiential Observation & Intercept Interviews
We visited a local shelter, the Humane Animal Rescue of Pittsburgh, to interview volunteers about their perspectives on working with cats, potential adopters and the data on their website. Of course, there was also some playtime with the kittens. This helped us empathize with potential pet parents and gain insights from the service-provider perspective. The most helpful aspect was being able to validate some user needs with shelter volunteers.
We used these validations along with our findings from user interviews to create a customer journey map.
This customer journey map shows the journey of a potential pet parent that goes through the stages of looking for cats and shelters, visiting the shelter, making a decision of whether to adopt, and bringing the cat home. This can be both an exciting and emotional experience and needs to be handled gently. Some issues we have identified for this process include: there not being enough information about cats online so the user ends up wasting a lot of time, the availability information is not up to date, the user feels guilted into adopting or is misinformed about a cat’s health status, and bringing the cat home is not always a smooth process. These issues can be mitigated through an effective online experience that helps the user stay connected and well-informed throughout their adoption journey.
Storyboarding
We enjoyed working on storyboards and parallel-prototyping new creative ideas. We appreciated the challenge of not including specific screen designs yet since the focus of this exercise was to highlight the user’s concerns and not a specific technical solution.
Though all three storyboards helped us further understand user concerns and ways we could improve user experience, we decided to go with the first storyboard on how we might help the user feel less guilty after deciding not to adopt a cat. We found that virtual play sessions were not a good proxy for physical interactions, and providing pet parents post=adoption help on pet care was out of scope.
How might we help a user feel not as guilty when they decide not to adopt a cat?
How might we provide info to cat adopters at home, without more load on staff/volunteers?
How might we help prospective pet parents connect with cats with low commitment?