Bambi Pet & Plant Sitter App makes it easy to find trusted minders across your local community ready to care for your pet and plant needs.
View prototypeBambi is a Pet and Plant Sitting mobile app. The name Bambi was inspired by Italian word for a baby. By the term baby, it also means "to look after". There are different situations in people's lives that needs pet and plant assistance. Like for example, business travelling and spending time overseas, going on a vacation, moving houses, long working hours, hospitalisation or injuries, or just to take their dog for a sniff around the block, Bambi got a reliable sitter for anyone. Bambi gives people the opportunity by making the most of their time away from their pet and plants free from worries.
With local maps for searching, Bambi Pet & Plant Sitter App makes it easy to find trusted sitters across the community ready to care for their pet and plant. Simply search the suburb and begin browsing through Bambi Pet & Plant Sitter in the area.
Bambi Pet & Plant Sitter is a trusted community for Pet and Plant Owners to search, connect, and easily book verified & insured Pet Care Services straight from your mobile phone. It's a safe, convenient and affordable way to make sure your best friend is in a loving home while you're away.
Because pet sitting has become a necessity for pet owners, providing them with a digital solution that connects them with pet sitters has become highly competitive. Pet and plant owners had specific goals and concerns about these services. The biggest service sold is peace of mind, trust and security for clients' home and pets. Facing competition, gaining user's trust, remaining the users and being recommended should be taken into consideration on building this app, and the core features needed to address these common pain points.
UX/UI Designer
Discovery / Research
Visual Design
Branding
Adobe XD
Marvel
Draw.io
Miro
Google slides
Pen & Paper
UX/UI Designer
User Researcher
Project Manager
The first step of this project involves gathering as much research as possible in order to better understand the design problem. This step is necessary to deeply empathise with our target users. Before jumping straight into a solution, it is crucial to understand and gather data. The scope will include desk research on pet sitting services, target demographic research, market analysis on Bambi's competitors and a deep dive into the needs and desires of the end-users. Within time constraints, this process could last anywhere between an hour to a couple of weeks.
Market Research was carried out to gain insights of the target markets of pet care industry offering their services online and to uncover trends and opportunities within the market.
Pet ownership in Australia is at an all-time high with 29 million pets in Australia and one of the highest rates of household pet ownership in the world. Dogs are the most popular type of pet with around 40% of Australian households including at least one dog. This is followed by cats (27%), fish (11%), birds (9%), small mammals (3%) and reptiles (2%).
Australians are estimated to be spending over $13 billion on food, health, accessories, and veterinary services accounting for half of all ongoing expenditure. While $13 billion may seem like a lot, we’ve broken down the costs associated with owning a pet in Australia. As of 2019 pet-owners have paid significantly more for their dog or cat in the last three years.
Dog owners who have paid more than $1000 for their pet and cat owners who have paid more than $500 for their pet. In 2019 the average acquisition costs include:
In the last three years, the cost of pet insurance has overtaken the average annual household spend for clipping/grooming, boarding/minding, and training/behavioural therapy. While most (48%) pet owners would turn to their family if they needed someone to look after their pet, pet owners who live in urban or inner-city areas are more likely to use a pet sitting service. 17% of prospective non-owners also consider the costs of boarding services to be one of the factors influencing their prospective pet ownership choice.
Younger generations like gen Y and Z will expect a streamlined process and a high-tech, efficient user experience. In contrast, Baby Boomers prefer a face to face transaction when purchasing a service. Gen X are more familiar working with a pet sitter but are open to digital means.
Pet care should be upgrading not only their technology systems and operating models but also focus on skill capabilities and work policies to resolve an expected exodus in baby boomers and a widening digital gap skills.
A competitive analysis was conducted to unmask the strengths and weaknesses of the main players in the pet care industry as well as study their commonalities.
I use a storyboard to provide additional context, using illustrations makes the story quick to understand at first glance and easy to remember.
Also, with the findings from desk research, I created a provisional personas to identify possible early adopters of pet sitting app and discover their needs.
User Interview participants with the below criteria were recruited online for user interviews:
All participants held an inconstant and fickle impression of pet care and sitters and admitted that they charge too much for their services.
It was now time to condense our research data with empathy to understand the end-user’s common goals, needs and behaviors.
Her name is Joan Mitchel. She is the composition of the user interview participants. Joan will guide us through the design process so our decisions along the way are aligned with the end-user’s goals and tackles the problems that need to be solved.
To get a closer look at Joan, an empathy map was made based on the collected data and observations in order to generate insights towards identifying and understanding her needs and problems.
Although understanding Joan's goals and needs is important, turning them into actionable problems statements is a crucial step to creating the right solutions for her needs:
During research, I have accumulated a list of common pet sitting services and asked 4 participants to do an unmoderated open card sorting exercise online. Each participant was asked to sort out all the pet sitting services from the list provided and give each category a name that made the most sense to them
Based on the results, the categories have been determined as:
To ensure that the app not only makes clients happy and continues as a sustainable business, I assure to identify the business, user and technical goals to create something that benefits both parties. Based on those project goals, I have created a feature roadmap to establish the Must-Have Features to create a reliable app fully functional.
Now that the pet and plant sitting categories features have been decided, I created a sitemap for the app flow to get an overview of how the stages will be prioritized, linked and labeled.
At this stage, I started by creating a task flow or a “happy path” focus on the primary motivations and steps required to illustrate how a user goes about completing a goal or task of booking a sitter.
It is just as important to identify the possible routes Joan will take in order to achieve her goal. Taking her behaviors and actions into consideration, I have created a user flow to find out how Joan will be booking a pet sitter on the app.
In the earlier stage during the collection of features from high-impact booking apps, I've studied and referenced some of their layouts and took the best parts that worked well and implement to our sketch wireframes. Marvel app were used for paper prototyping for user testing.
After sketching out a few patterns I proceed to digitizing them. I have dissected the parts of each pattern from the sketches to create a starting point for my low fidelity wireframes shown below:
Check out the lo-fi prototype
Interestingly, receiving feedback from 3 remote user testers gave me keen sight of needed revisions and more focus on their pain points. It set out a clear vision of what’s important for a booking app service, like the use of icons and how it gives purpose to the users in achieving their booking goals.
Similar to the approach to my sketches, I have put together some inspirations aimed at creating the theme that the Bambi app experience is inviting, trustworthy and have a sense of community.
Staying true to the brand attributes, I chose the brand colors to be a bright turquoise. The color blue-green is neutral, tranquil in nature that is well-accepted for both female and male users. It promotes the feeling of empathy, caring and trust. I pick warm yellow as a secondary color as it pairs greatly with blue and symbolizes optimism, cheer and encourage communication.
As for the logo, I wanted to create a sense of trust and show protection from the company and construct simple symbols of pets and a plant in a hand. I decided to move forward with this logo design to meet the timeline of the project.
I also have created the category icons as well to tie in the overall look of the brand and ended up with the Bambi UI kit
With some design solutions and revisions response from the feedback of the user tester, are below:
Applying the brand guidelines and UI kit to build my high fidelity wireframes (shown below), I put them together into a limited prototype in preparation for usability testing.
Check out the prototype
There are a few things that we want to make this landing page work. We designed it as simple and with relevant imagery. The headline is straightforward and the description of the website informs users of the specific service they will get by downloading the app.
Check out the landing page
Once the prototype was ready, I prepared for usability testing in order to determine whether the app works as intended with our target demographic. The test was conducted with 6 participants over Microsoft Teams conference call where they were given scenarios to complete specific tasks.
The test objectives include:
Affinity Mapping
There are still things that can be tested and improved on, including but not limited to:
This project was quite challenging because it was all done online. The chosen app service based on a pet and also a plant sitter can easily become overwheling and time consuming, but because it's not an average service you can find, the idea was welcomed by my peers and educator.
I enjoyed doing the High-Fidelity Prototype revisions after the usability testing. Although it was a bit time consuming, it was a great learning experience to always design for WCAG accessibility no matter how tight the deadline is. Also, having a bit knowledge on GDPR on data protection and privacy.
Creating the theme! Pet and plants are two things I adore. It was interesting trying to design a brand for an app that combines pet and plant where they have to be taken care of and putting them in one design was quite enjoyable.
I was overwhelmed with the two types of features, I had to narrow down and figure out which must haves were feasible on the first iteration. But, now that I’ve got some experience, maybe it won’t be as bad next time.
One thing I didn’t account for was recruiting enough participants in my class due to time constriction. Online learning has ups and downs, like poor connections, mic and video not working, sudden latop issues, participant not available, etc. Next time, I would budget my time more wisely and give room for unexpected circumstances.
