Project Overview
During my time at SMU, all engineering majors had to take a class named Technical Entrepreneurship where we took an idea then created a product for it, managed that idea/product, and finally pitched it to “investors” (another team in the class and the professor). It was a semester-long project and I took it upon myself to design, prototype, and develop our product to show to our investors so they could see the fruits of our labor and see the vision more clearly. Our initial idea was to make pet adoptions a little easier and to minimize the amount of animals that were euthanized each year.
The Problem
Pet shelters have limited funds and space and the adoption process is tedious. What if there was a way to showcase every pet at a shelter by displaying their story? With that, the users could potentially adopt or donate to a pet of their liking (the money would go to medical expenses, shelter expenses, food, toys, etc.)
Role
UX Designer & Developer (March 2019 - May 2019)
Responsibilities
- Led product design and prototyping
- Iterated on designs based on team feedback
- Developed frontend and backend of MVP
Users
The target users are pet adopters, donators, and shelters
User Research Summary
- User research was performed by someone else on the team and we found that there’s no app or site that shows all shelters or pets within a given area.
- Pet adopters have to go to the shelter personally to see and meet pets before adoption - the process would be facilitated if users could request appointments, do paperwork, and track their adoption process online.
- The users wanted a way to filter through pets (cat vs dog, small vs large, color, etc.) and have filters for personal/home limitations (whether they have kids, backyard, etc.)
- There is currently no way for pet lovers to donate to certain pets or shelters so it was a desired feature.
Final Designs
- I used the bootstrap library to build this with Angular
- The main idea was to allow the users to filter out the pets they want to see and then they could adopt, donate, or move to the next pet
- The user can learn more about the mission and core principles of RufLove on the ‘About Us’ page
Product Successes
- Users can start/track their adoptions and donations online.
- Shelters are shown for a certain zipcode and users are able to filter and save their pet preferences.
- If this were a real product, we would be helping so many shelters and pets!
Next Steps
For starters, we would need to set a style guide and have better styling. We would want to add an FAQ section, ads between selections (to increase revenue), an information section for new pet owners/adopters, a forum to give pet lovers a community, and an in-app tutorial for new users.
