The key to a healthy, lasting pet adoption is a good match between the animal’s needs and owner’s lifestyle. But adopters often don’t realize the importance of lifestyle fit, and most animal shelters don’t have the resources to ensure that owners are aware of and prepared to meet pets’ individual needs.
For healthier adoptions and fewer returned pets, shelters need a more efficient way to connect with potential adopters and prepare them for proper care.
Pupdate is our vision for a more humane pet adoption platform, designed to encourage human stakeholders to consider the animal’s wellbeing at every step of the process.
Pupdate is designed to facilitate a more transparent adoption process, so that prospective adopters are well-prepared to care for their new pets needs, and shelters can stay connected with adopters to improve outcomes.
The Care Plan offers prospective adopters a way to “preview” the needs and responsibilities of a new pet, makes it easy for new owners to access resources for care in the moments when they need it most.
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Pupdate’s “Story” feature leverages the psychology of narrative to encourage consideration for each pet as a stakeholder in the adoption with needs an interests, rather than an object of transaction.
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Different stakeholders can contribute to a pet’s story over time. Prior to adoption, shelters can use “story” to inform potential adopters. After, owners use story to track progress, ask for help, and stay connected.
PupDate is designed with shelters and adopters in mind. While the mobile UI is designed for “in-the-moment” care, the desktop UI presents the same information and utilities in a format designed to streamline the administrative functions of a caretaker or adoption counselor.
Pupdate’s tablet / desktop application was designed streamline administrative duties and deliver key insights for adoption counselors looking to better manage, track, and optimize their organization over time.
Pupdate’s pet-centric approach to adoption creates value for owners, shelters, and animals alike. Here’s just a few ways that Pupdate can make a difference:
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Pupdate puts the needs of the animal at the center of the adoption process. Since every pet and person is unique, our design looks deeper to cultivate healthier matches based on needs and lifestyle.
By presenting each pet’s information in the familiar “timeline” or “story” format, Pupdate’s design encourages users to consider each animal as a stakeholder with needs and interests, rather than simply an object of transaction.
Pupdate gives owners an opportunity to “preview” the responsibilities of life with their new pet, and enables shelters to collect useful data on each new adoption to improve the match making process in the future.
Our research phase began with the goal of better understanding what people go through when they adopt a pet, particularly what factors contribute to unsuccessful adoptions and returned pets.
To do this, we conducted guided storytelling interviews with first time adopters, contextual inquiry with adoption counselors, and guerrilla research by talking to attendees of Pittsburgh Pet Expo about their experiences with with adoption.
Volunteers at the Pittsburgh Pet Expo (left) and images from our tour of Animal Friends Shelter (right)
The most valuable outcome of our research was learning to see pet adoption as less of a transaction and more of a matchmaking process.
Although aspects of adoption strongly resemble a traditional purchasing experience, healthy adoptions treat the pet as an independent party with needs and interests — rather than an object of transaction — and strive to form a healthy, mutually nurturing partnership between pet and owner.
Owners who have a lifestyle that fits the needs of the animal they’re adopting (housing, activity level, children / other pets) tend to be much happier and less likely to return the pet in the future.
Most adopters come in a preconceived idea of their "perfect" pet, but fail to consider if the needs of a particular breed align with their lifestyle. Advocating for the needs of each pet and helping adopters understand the necessary conditions for proper care (e.g. space, home life, activity level) is a huge part of the job.
Just like people, every animal is different. Because they come with a unique configuration of traits and experiences, finding a healthy match between pets and adopters is a different process every time. Rather than rely on rules, counselors need to understand each animals' needs individually
Based on our research, we found that a fundamental issue of pet adoption is that man shelters simply aren’t well-equipped to ensure a healthy match in every single adoption. As a result, owners are often unprepared to take proper care of the new pet, and more pets end up being returned to the shelter.
Realizing that healthy adoptions were about aligning the interests of pets and adopters, we felt it was important to capture the journeys of each stakeholder involved in the pet adoption process:
From generating the journey maps, we were able to identify many different pain points that offered opportunities for intervention through design:
Early sketches of the Pupdate app for mobile, designed with consideration for the constraints of using while caring for a pet.
Using these opportunities to fuel our ideation process, we developed some of the more promising solutions into storyboards to communicate our ideas:
What if new pet owners could easily connect to pool their resources, share advice, and support one another through the post-adoption challenges?
What if new pet owners could easily connect to pool their resources, share advice, and support one another through the post-adoption challenges?
What if new pet owners could easily connect to pool their resources, share advice, and support one another through the post-adoption challenges?
Next, we conducted speed dating with the storyboards to collect feedback from target users and rapidly iterate over our design concepts:
Based on our interviews with adoption counselors and previous adopters, we arrived at the following principles to narrow our exploration in the design phase:
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No amount of research can prepare new adopters for the changes in lifestyle that come with adopting a new pet. Many adopters wished they could "preview" life with a new pet before taking the plunge.
Presenting the animal as an individual entity with a story and experiences encouraged users to consider the animals' wellbeing more strongly. As such, we wanted our solution to feel like users were meeting a new friend, rather than browsing for things online.
While adopters were looking for window into pets' lives before the adoption, and shelter employees wish they could check in after. Encouraging adopters and employees to document pets' experiences in a continuous "timeline" is one way to address this issue, but doing so needs to be easy, fun, and rewarding.
Since our solution would need to connect adopters and shelter employees in a meaningful way, we started by comparing each stakeholder’s journey and capturing important touchpoints for our prototype.
After identifying the core functions that would need to be captured in our prototype, we used these touchpoints to develop a user flow to focus and prioritize as we moved into wireframing:
We used sketching to explore different ways of interacting with target users at certain key touchpoints.
Recognizing that shelter employees and pet owners would likely have very different contexts of use, we began by delineating how certain key functions would be represented on different devices:
Early sketches of the Pupdate app for mobile, designed with consideration for the constraints of using while caring for a pet.
Since pets can be such a handful, users told us it was valuable to access and capture important information from their phone. So we prioritized designing the owner facing experience as a mobile UI.
Big buttons and bold icons make it easy for users to access useful instructions for care "in the moment" while caring for their pet.
Presenting pets’ info in the familiar timeline format lets users “get to know” each animal as a being with needs and interests.
Users can capture and contribute updates to a pets’ timeline, creating useful data for future adopters or shelters alike.
The desktop profile screen takes advantage of the additional screen space to allow shelter staff to access all of a pets’ information in one space, with total parity to the mobile app.
The shelter dashboard allows users who work with the pets to get whole-shelter stats at a glance and keep tabs on each individual pet in the facility
Pupdate is our vision for a more humane pet adoption platform, designed to encourage human stakeholders to consider the animal’s wellbeing at every step of the process.
Pupdate is designed to facilitate a more transparent adoption process, so that prospective adopters are well-prepared to care for their new pets needs, and shelters can stay connected with adopters to improve outcomes.
PupDate is designed with shelters and adopters in mind. While the mobile UI is designed for “in-the-moment” care, the desktop UI presents the same information and utilities in a format designed to streamline the administrative functions of a caretaker or adoption counselor.
Presenting each pet’s information in a narrative format is a powerful way to get users to consider and value the pet’s needs and wellbeing. By encourages transparency and continuity of care, “stories” allow shelters learn from each adoption and improve future outcomes.
Every pet comes with unique needs and instructions for care, and until now shelters had no good way to synthesize this info. The Care Plan feature allows prospective adopters to “preview” the responsibilities of ownership before adopting, and serves as a useful reference to ensure proper care after.
PupDate is designed with shelters and adopters in mind. While the mobile UI is designed for “in-the-moment” care, the desktop UI presents the same information and utilities in a format designed to streamline the administrative functions of a caretaker or adoption counselor.
Pupdate’s tablet / desktop application was designed streamline administrative duties and deliver key insights for adoption counselors looking to better manage, track, and optimize their organization over time.
Pupdate’s pet-centric approach to adoption creates value for owners, shelters, and animals alike. Here’s just a few ways that Pupdate can make a difference:
Pupdate puts the needs of the animal at the center of the adoption process. Since every pet and person is unique, our design looks deeper to cultivate healthier matches based on needs and lifestyle.
By presenting each pet’s information in the familiar “timeline” or “story” format, Pupdate’s design encourages users to consider each animal as a stakeholder with needs and interests, rather than simply an object of transaction.
Pupdate gives owners an opportunity to “preview” the responsibilities of life with their new pet, and enables shelters to collect useful data on each new adoption to improve the match making process in the future.
At the conclusion of the project we were given the opportunity to pitch our concept and field questions from panel of stakeholders including local shelter employees and adoption counselors:
Notably, our pitch setup featured one very special stakeholder (bottom right) who inspired us to always consider the animals' experience.
As an early and formative experience in our design education at CMU, there's much about this project that warrants acknowledging as great teaching moments and opportunities to improve in the future:
Pupdate works well as a concept piece for challenging prevalent attitudes about adoption, notably consumerist bent that values human tastes and interests above the wellbeing of animals. But to change behaviors through design requires a deeper dive into motivations and system-level considerations that simply weren't in scope for this project.
Given more time, we'd like to have spent more time conducting contextual inquiry with adoption counselors and shelter workers, to better understand how exactly resource constraints manifested in their work caring for the animals and facilitating adoptions. This would allow us to create a tool that more honestly reflects the realities of their daily operations.
One of our favorite aspects of this project, and an important learning moment for us all, was recognizing the power of format and framing for shaping perceptions and behavior. Feedback from user testing on the "story" or "timeline" format affirmed that how info is presented in a design has huge potential to shape behavior positively.
