For this project, I was tasked at creating a pet information app providing the user with knowledge tailored to their pets, the minimum page count was 4 and those were the Discover, Maps, Learn and Profile pages, I extended the brief by creating 1 more page dedicated to showcasing the different subscription tiers, I used this page to experiment a too by trying out an idea I had in my head which was to have the page background gradually change according to the selected plan, I managed to achieve this using the Figma Prototype mode, and the smart animate feature which I went into more detail in the animation video I created, I then screen recorded the section, compressed the video, turned it into a GIF using an mp4 to GIF converter website and added it onto my site to create an easy way to view the animation, I learnt quite a lot by doing this as it pushed me to learn something new and from now on, I certainly will be animating more elements within my next designs as I find it adds quite a bit to the overall experience creating a more polished look.

Looking into the research, I created 2 user personas, the first one being a 21 year old woman who is a marketing coordinator, and recently adopted a cat and is eager to learn for her new pet from reliable sources, she also likes using apps especially for learning and wants an easy way to find nearby locations such as pet stores and track her pet’s health; now all of these requirements instantly made me realise the importance of creating a seamless and intuitive experience for pet owners who are eager to learn and track aspects of their pet’s daily life like health, so I’d want to make this as simple as possible to minimise the amount of time spent for a user to try and figure out how to do certain things, that’s why I chose to add intuitive icons on the nav bar at the bottom of the screen visibly displaying the maps, and a unique icon used for discover chosen as it represents a centre indicating ‘learning centre’, I also created a 2^nd user persona which was quite different, for starters, he’s a 42 year old male veterinarian worker which means he should already have knowledge on pet info, but would make it more challenging for me as it would mean this user would require a more advanced experience, this is why I chose to create separate sections of knowledge such as health, academy and others allowing the user to dive in deeper to the sections they want to explore; not only that but the addition of the goal system would make it so there’s a clear user learning path which would gradually get more in-depth the longer the user learns like levels getting harder on a game, this also creates the welcomed effect of user retention and return, giving the app user something to come back to. By making the user personas quite different from each other would overall help me to think inclusively, allowing me to create an app that will fit a wider userbase therefore catering to more people, as a result, making the app more financially viable due to a greater percentage of users and possible subscription holders increasing the overall income. Still within the research aspect of this project, I used a few other methods on aiming insights into pet owners and their needs, one of the ways was that I created a questionnaire with quite a few questions on pet owners, habits, pet info and more, with 15 responses ranging from ages 17 – 54, I believe I got quite a good variety of users, and the information received helped me to focus on certain aspects, so for example, I asked the users which feature they would want the most, and the top 2 results were “Pet Training Modules”, Tips & Articles” , this shows that people really do want a pet information app, but the pet training modules gives yet another useful feature which I otherwise wouldn’t have thought about adding, so I added it into the app design under the post category  “Academy” which would serve as a pet training centre, providing even more abilities from just general knowledge.

Moving on to competitor analysis, I found that there wasn’t really much out there in terms of competitors, there were a lot of apps out there solving little problems but found a pattern where you’d need to install over 5 different apps to get the same functionality out of this single app; not only that, but the apps out there didn’t really have any reviews, most I found had under 5 reviews with 2 apps having over 2K+, and those 2 being the only ones which were subscription based, showing that users are willing to pay for convenience and more advanced features over smaller apps that only solve 1 or 2 problems, this overall would give TailCentre a better chance in the app market especially since it has free for all features, paired with more advanced functions locked behind subscription tiers, but if the app solves most of the problems users are facing, it makes sense to publish this product.

Looking at the feature selection, I began to think of more ways to make this app enticing to users, and instead of it just being a learning and location finding for local stores, to integrate even more useful features like pet health tracking, community events, tailored pet info, walking routes and much more, making it the centre of yours and your pet’s wants & needs; but why stop there, this app could go so much further with a community centre where users can upload their walking routes, information, events, local store sales, vet linking which could add tons of more features like scheduling appointments, purchasing medication, viewing medical documents and tons more, making it the centre for the user’s pet(s).

Critiquing my design, now there are a lot of things I like about how the design has turned out, some being the unified visual across the pages, equal and breathable spacing, accessible fonts, clear icons, and an overall clean and easy to understand app backed by peer feedback notes, there are certainly things I would change if I had more time, starting with the colours chosen, whilst colourful and matching the same visual style, they often became a nuisance to use due to accessibility reasons causing there to be not much contrast between elements in turn not making the app as accessible as I’d like it to be, not only that but they can sometimes be difficult to pair up and still look visually pleasing, in the future, I’d narrow down the colours and choose better contrasting ones to not face the same issues; next is fonts, whilst I love Rozha One which was used for the headings, It can at times become an accessibility problem due to the visual style making it challenging to read at times, which is the main reason why I chose it just for the headings as they are big, bold and don’t have a lot of text, for the other font Dosis, I really like it and think it’s clean looking, fitting the visual style quite well.

During the project, I faced quite a few challenges including research limitations due to the lack of competitors making me have to think from the ground up for a few things, and to help my uncertainty with certain features, I used the modular design to my advantage by making it so that features can be added or removed with ease without effecting the visual style or spacing of the app as components would be contained in on-page cards making everything feel unified whilst also creating visual separation between element.

How I extended the brief – I felt like there were a few things I wanted to add to the project that would improve the final product, the first one being additional features, mainly inspired by feedback from the questionnaire I set out, but people got back saying they’d love to see pet training modules which added a new type of learning into the app under the post category name ‘Academy’; I also decided to take designing a little further and created an animation for the plan tier selection page, creating a flowing animation when a plan is selected, the main idea was to have the background pull the plan colour and add it as a gradient background, fading with each swipe to match the selected plan, not only that, but I also made it so that the subscribe button faded from the plan that wasn’t selected to clearly show which plan was selected, to create this effect, I used the feature bult in to Figma itself called Prototype, where I was able to connect different pages and make them seamlessly switch between them, imitating an in-app animation sequence, I used a range of features within ‘prototype’ such as the animate feature, delay feature, element linking and more.

The impact of the app is to provide the user with a singular location for information tailored to their pets, learning progress tracking, community features, what’s nearby locations for nearby pet stores, vet clinics and more offering a centralised experience for pet owners.

In conclusion, I would’ve loved to have had more time on this project to really push this app idea even further and see how useful I can really make it, I also would’ve liked to have reached out to people in vets and pet stores and just in general people in the industry to gain their views on an app like this, possibly gaining useful feedback on the apps possibilities and changed I could make, especially since they are in the industry so would have extensive knowledge on common issues, needs and general questions around pets; I’d also like to look further in to the monetisation side of the app, figuring out more ways to make an income via not only subscription tiers but possibly ads too and how they’d be implemented; overall I really enjoyed working on this project and it certainly pushed me to think differently and really get deep into the research phase before even looking at the design, working out strategies to ensure the app meets it’s needs and more.