Supporting healthy social interactions for dogs and their owners.
10 weeks
Identify an opportunity to improve the socialization process for dog owners and dogs.
Components include an attachable button, collar, and app that work together to identify the compatibility of two dogs as they interact on walks.
Mainly be in charge of user researching and designing the user flow and user interfaces in team of 4. Helping with storyboarding and builded the promotion website
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If you are interested in a specific part of the design process, feel free to click the button to learn more about it!
Things are very complicated when it comes to relationships, I mean, for dogs too. And what's worse, we the dog owners are usually the one to deal with the consequences after our dogs weirdly socialize with other dogs.
uncomfortable and sometimes tense interactions between other owners and dogs can arise if a dog has trouble socializing.
loneliness in dogs is also a commonplace issue. For many owners, finding a way to slowly and safely expose their dogs to others is often a challenging task.
Ease the socialization process between dogs and unfamiliar owners and dogs, without automating the original interaction between dogs and dog owners.
Save dog owners time and effort of dealing with awkward and inefficient interaction with other dog owners due to negative dog socialization.
To better understand our target users: the dogs and the dog owners, we conducted user research to understand 2 main concerns that we had:
What are some concerns/frustrations that dog owners have that can be solved by technology?
We wanted to understand what their daily routines are like with their dogs. Since our research would include some personal questions, having a in-depth semi-structure interview would help us a lot and made the participants more openminded when they are talking about their concerns. And observing the environment that the stakeholders were at would help us to identify some pain points that the dog owners who might not be aware of.
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Collar/Leash Wearable
We chose the 2nd design: Collar/Leash Wearable, because:
Our proposed solution aims to support finding short and long-term compatibility between dogs. Our design encourages dog friendships by identifying positive interactions while alerting owners of possible negative interactions in advance. For long-term companionship, our design allows exploration of compatible adoptable dogs looking for a new home. The components include an attachable button, collar, and app that work together to identify the compatibility of two dogs as they interact on walks.
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When an owner takes their dog for a walk and encounters another dog, the collar will display a blue light to indicate a possible compatibility and yellow if unlikely. However, the physical button can be used to override a false prediction.
The visual report and trait summary feature help give transparency as to what dogs are likely to be compatible. This promotes active reflection about the dog’s social interactions
The adoption feature provides location-based adoption suggestions according to the dog's compatible type of dogs.
Owner input about their dog's personality works as the basis for compatibility identification.
We provide tutorial for first time user to obtain a better understanding on hot to use our devices.
Reviews after a walk can help us do a better compatibility analysis and deal with the use case that the other dog doesn't have a Pawsitive device.
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