Timeline
September-December (12 weeks)
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator
Contributors
Solo
The Problem
As more than half of Canadian households own at least one dog or cat, pet care factors into the lives of many individuals and families and involves a number of responsibilities and challenges that be very overwhelming. This includes managing your pet’s overall health & safety, finding trusted professionals that can meet you and your pets needs, scheduling appointments, and more.
This project aimed to address the question: how can pet care management be made easier for pet parents?
The Solution
Barkwell — A mobile platform aimed at providing a convenient and personalized place that connects pet parents with trusted professionals, streamlines appointment booking, and ensures every furry friend receives the best care they deserve.
Create Pet Profiles
Create personalized profiles for each of your furry friends for quick access to important medical documents and other information about them in regards to their care that your pet providers may need to know.
Browse & Filter Pet Services
Scroll and filter through pet care businesses and discover local groomers, veterinarians, trainers, and boarding facilities based on you and your pets needs
Connect with Trusted Professionals
Communicate with trusted businesses and professionals to ask questions about their services or to get help with your pet
Book & Manage Appointments
Conveniently book and manage service appointments for your pets with registered businesses in your area
01/ Preliminary Research
As the scope of this course project was focused on branding and design systems, my research process was limited to secondary research and 4 short interviews with pet owners in my circle of close family and friends. Here were my key findings:
02/ Competitor Analysis
My next step was to conduct an analysis of competitors in the pet care industry to better understand the existing products and services on the market and to identify what could be improved on and the gaps that my product could potentially fill.
Friendly
Playful
Trustworthy
Convenience
Accessibility
Connection
Simplicity
04/ Visual Identity
The process of building the brand's visual identity involved an exploration into many logo concepts, colour palettes and typographic styles that would suit the defined tone and values
05/ Information Architecture
After deciding on the features that I wanted my app to include, I created this IA diagram outlining the products' structure and content hierarchy.
06/ User Flow
An outlined user flow of booking an appointment for your pet
07/ Wireframes
Based on the established information architecture, I went through several rounds of designing wireframes, making adjustments to layouts and navigation based on feedback from my peers and professor before moving to the final prototyping stage.
08/ Design Program
To keep a consistency in my high fidelity wireframes, I established a design system outlining colour styles, typography, iconography, components, and layouts to be applied to my product screens.
Final Takeaways
Completing this project provided me with really valuable insights into some of the processes involved in building a brand identity from scratch and the importance of establishing design systems to maintain consistency across my designs. Through establishing my design system and prototyping my product's mockups, I also further developed my skills in Figma and learned how to make use of components and auto-layout to output and make changes to designs efficiently.
Looking back, what would I do differently?
With more time and resources, I definitely think that this project would have benefitted from a more thorough and formal user interview process, as well as from creating personas and customer journey maps to gain a deeper understanding of user needs, wants, and pain points. Similarly, I would have also liked to conduct several rounds of usability testing within my target audience.
