Overview

An estimated 6.5 million companion animals are surrendered, abandoned, and rescued each year in the U.S. alone. This number includes not only cats and dogs, but many other domesticated animals as well.

There are a few cat and dog adoption apps, and even a couple adoption apps that include other pets, but there’s a distinct lack of apps that include the option to foster animals in need.

Solution

With shelters at critical mass and closing due to lack of funding, and a surge of households interested in fostering, an app that bridges this divide could save countless lives.

Introducing Sit & Stay, a community-centered app dedicated to getting pets into homes, no matter what kind of animal or for how long.

This app would connect animal lovers with like-minded individuals, avenues to both foster and adopt, and ways to donate and volunteer; all in one place.

Research

As mentioned before, when looking into what other applications offered, I noticed a lack of apps that cater to fostering, as well as a lack of services addressing non cat and dog pets.

Apps that focused on dogs were highly selective, giving the impression that you were “shopping” for a pet more than helping one. Apps with more options were overly cluttered with useless tabs, pages, and information. All of this, as well as there being no option to get more involved with organizations, left the apps feeling surface level and fragmented.

Survey results said:

When asking surveyees that where interested in adopting and fostering pets what barriers have stopped them in the past, they said:

Key Takeaways

The message was clear.

Development

Going from wireframe to prototype, user testing indicated areas to improve the user experience and legibility of the app. To keep the feed more compact, I thought to implement ‘more’ preview dropdowns for posts that were longer than a few sentences. After testing, it was obvious that the constant need to engage to view the whole post was reducing user interaction with said posts. By removing the feature, users were more likely to try and navigate to the comments and user profile, indicating a better reception of the tile format.

Before the wireframe, “Date listed” was ‘date added’. It was recommended to re-word the prompt, making it clearer that it was referring to pet listings and not just any post. A similar issue arose with “Looking to…” where the timeframe of long term and short term weren’t expanded on, leaving users confused as to what they meant. I added a short explanation to the options to mitigate those issues.