Furtrieve Health
An app that helps dog owners to track their dog’s health and nutrition
Furtrieve, LLC
1 Design Mentor
4 Product Designers
As a Product Designer, I owned the design deliverables while working collaboratively with the team on research, planning, and analysis.
Research - I contributed to the research plan, conducted interviews, analysis, and client hand-off.
Design - I facilitated a brainstorming session with the team followed by the creation of low-fidelity designs. I also developed user flows, led the visual designs, delivered a high-fidelity interactive prototype for user testing.
Furtrieve is a GPS technology company transforming how people can track their pets. Furtrieve enables pet owners to track and recover their dog(s) if they get lost, with the help of a 'Furtrieve tracker' and 'Furtrieve mobile app.'
To grow the business and establish itself in the dog health domain Furtrieve aims to pivot its direction. They aim to develop a new product, 'Furtrieve Health,' an app enabling users to track their pets' health by monitoring factors such as behavior, weight, food intake, and activity tracking.
Currently, the Furtrieve app allows users to track their dogs if they buy their collar with a monthly subscription with no health monitoring capabilities.
Dog owners have difficulty understanding their dog's behavior and health, leading to misdiagnosis and further problems. If Furtrieve introduces these health and behavior monitoring capabilities in its app, they will be able to target a broader user base of approximately 63 million households that have at least one dog in the US.
During our concept design phase, we collaboratively explored multiple solution ideas to build the Furtrieve Health app. We removed the dependency on buying a collar and a subscription to the Furtrieve app and introduced features that helped the dog owners with their dogs' health and behavior analysis.
Users can scan their dog to know its behavior, and the app will use computer vision for analysis.
Users can look at parameters like happiness, anxiety, fear, etc., that influence their dog's behavior weekly or monthly.
Users can scan prescriptions from their vets, and the app will save them for medication analysis.
Users can add multiple dogs in the app and track their health individually.
After the initial project brief from our client, we devised a research plan to strategize our research. As a team, we defined our research goals to understand the nuances of dog health industry.
With the help of the interviews and surveys we were able to identify 4 major themes.
Dietary needs of a dog will change based on its age, breed, and medical condition(pregnancy)
Some dog breeds have inherent health problems and dietary issues
28.2% dog owner misdiagnosed their dog’s health at least once
15.3% dog owners reported that their dogs have special dietary needs
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Our research helped us develop an understanding about dog's health, behaviour and nutrition. These insights were useful during our brainstorming session to generate a plethora of ideas for further down-selection.
Before starting our ideation based on our client's brief we made the following assumptions.
We used the following how might we's to reframe our insights from research into opportunities to spark ideas.
How might we enable dog owners to analyze mental and physical health of their dogs?
How might we enable dog owners to record their dog's medical data?
The team generated multiple ideas during this exercise. Since this was an open problem, we didn't have much insight into what the features would be, so we generated ideas in abundance. We also invited people from outside the team to help us think of more ideas.
After evaluating all the ideas based on their feasibility, we down-selected our top 3 ideas below.
We created product concepts for all the three ideas to present to our stakeholders to identify the final design direction for Furtreive health.
We sketched multiple ideas for different screens of the app during after our brainstorming session.
Based on the sketches, our team created some quick wireframes and presented them to our client. These wireframes provided the client with an initial concept using which they could provide their feedback.
After reviewing the wireframes with Furtrieve we were able to decide on the features that we wanted to keep in our app. Below are the complete set of features and navigation that was used in our final designs.
While ideating we had to consider both new dog owners and seasoned dog owners. We learned about the 3 important problems after discussing the wireframes with the clients.
Our team iterated on the wireframes based on the user and client feedback and created a high-fidelity designs to test with our users. While creating these designs we followed the design guidelines provided by Furtreive.
Since Furtreive Health App is a new app for dog users, therefore, we evaluated this app with 8 users to ensure that the app is well accepted among dog owners. The participants for this test were people who were dogs for at least one year.
Overall, users saw a lot of potential in the application of this app for their dogs and the concept of the app was well received.
P.S: The app design was handed-off to the Furtrieve's development team in May 2021
Being able to think of a new concept and implement it for our client was very rewarding and also helped me in understanding the following.
