Today I’d like to present the concept of the new dog walking service to help dog owners caring for and walking their dogs. My role in this project as a product designer, was to go through the consecutive steps of app creation end-to-end: define a problem through user research, analyze competitors offer, create user persona and identify users pain points, create user flow and wireframes, ideate visual design, prototype and conduct a user testing to refine and deliver the final result. The goal of the project is to create functioning prototype that addresses and solves the user needs such as clear and easy interface with trustworthy reliable service.

Market Research

The market is dominated by two competitors - Wag and Rover. There are a few pros and cons to each app, and my goal was to create an experience that was easier in terms of onboarding (e.g user can skip account creation if only wants to see if there’s any walker in the area) and think about product design methods and business processes to solve users pain points in regards to trust and reliability.

User Research

User research has been conducted on 7 people of 27-37 y.o. dog owners of various background and professions. Research interviews revealed what the group likes, wants to have and unsure about. In summary:

The next step was to gather all that information and define user persona – fictional user that best represented all of my findings.

Wireframes

Based on all the information that I’ve gathered, I drew the initial user flow and wireframes. I attempted to eliminate multiple steps of onboarding, user can go straight to search and dashboard, if they don’t want to give their email information, they can also browse and see available walkers in the area or search by specific criteria.

Very first wireframes were super low-fidelity drawn on paper, I’ve polished the workflow and usability on these final versions of high-res wireframes.

Visual Design

When it comes to design, knowing the tool becomes crucial how efficient the design process will be. Knowing common design patterns and using the power of auto-layout, components, styles as well as building the design system helps to design and scale faster and effectively.

Creative process started with origami-inspired mood board, vector art, exploring different textures as background and using contrasting color schema and mutually compatible sans-serifs Sansation and Rubik.

some of the early visual explorations...

Components library

Final Design

Visual design is minimalistic, yet friendly. Logo is made of vector lines and resembles dog folded of paper. The logo and name reflects the simplicity and straightforwardness of the app’s purpose; Sobaka means “dog” in Russian language.

Prototype

First prototype that I’ve made lacked sense of completion of the flow, e.g “Thank you for booking” page. It also showed that headers were too close to the notch, so I needed to move the elements around; also some text boxes and icons needed alignment. I also added an additional flow for splash/onboarding/introduction to provide the explanation of value proposition of the app.

Takeaways

• business acumen and creative vision should go together as not all users pain points and needs could be solved purely with visual design. Functional UI is a good aid, but the foundation is business processes. Good example is Apple that solved many problems that users had to figure out themselves prior, now a lot of workflows like updates or storage is behind the scenes, it just works!

• know the tools. Learning design tools (also using right plugins and resources for designers) in depth gives good foundation to create design that works and can be handed off to developers with no issues. Knowing most common design patterns helps to avoid reinventing the wheel.

• reveal issues and fix it fast with working prototype. Testing designs and flow immediately is indispensable for fast delivering the end result.

Thank you for reading!