Doggo Case Study
An app that helps your dog make friends and socialize.
Project Specs
- Time: 5 days
- Members: Daniel Zhang, Yimeng Hou
- Design space: Human-Animal Interaction, harmonic cohabitation
- Parts: Formative research, design challenge exploration, ideation & down-selection, prototyping
Where did we start
Have you ever noticed your dog being sad? I’m sure many dog owners do, but do you always understand what your dog really needs when it’s sad?
Being dog lovers, we both agree to the idea that dogs also need extensive emotional care, just like what humans need. But the reality is that sometimes dogs, and pets in general, are facing mental health problems. Sometimes we overlook their feelings unintentionally because of communication barriers, and intentionally because we don’t think it’s important.
We all want to communicate well and live well with our pets under the same roof. That’s why we want to design a solution that can help us better understand our pets using scientific ways and reduce their unseen mental problems.
Formative research
Research activities
To learn more about pets and their interaction with humans, we conducted 5 interviews with dog owners.
- We interviewed 5 dog owners by sending messages, making phone calls and face to face;
- We designed questions to figure out how people are living with their dogs, how they interact with each other, and what help they need to better communicate.
We also conducted secondary research on related articles and papers to understand more about pets’ mental health problems, human-animal interaction, and high-tech in animal communication.
Study reveals how dogs actually communicate with humans: https://www.womanandhome.com/life/news-entertainment/dogs-communicate-humans-study-344947/
Say Woof? AI in Animal Language Translation: https://syncedreview.com/2020/01/27/say-woof-ai-in-animal-language-translation/
Do Dogs Get Depression: https://www.thesprucepets.com/do-dogs-get-depression-1112512
Many animals can become mentally ill: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150909-many-animals-can-become-mentally-ill
Findings
After analyzing with the raw data from research, we came up with the following:
- People are aware of their dogs having potential mental problems, and they are willing to try new tech solutions to help them spend more time with their dogs;
- Animals/Pets when they communicate, some signals would be so subtle that humans would always miss;
- Animals suffer mental health problems from time to time, and the causes are similar to the causes commonly seen in humans;
- Artificial intelligence is quite helpful for extracting information that we normal people are not physically able.
Design challenge exploration
What we found out of research actually made us more clear that HAI(Human-Animal Interaction) is crucial to both human and animal, and a better communication could be needed by a majority of pet owners.
we started to think that our design challenge should focused on how to raise people’s awareness of the importance of dogs’ mental health issues, reduce or avoid the possibility of dogs to have mental problems, and let dogs and their owners live in a harmonious environment.
Ideation & down-selection
First, we agreed upon a point of view to explore the design space:
A dog owner, whose dog is often depressed and anxious needs to communicate with his/her dog better, because understand and solve the mental problems that his/her dog has are very important.
Then, we did a wild brainstorming of 19 different approaches to the challenge. We voted on our favorite approaches and affinized them to help us narrow down our idea to four main categories: tech challenges, social awareness, pets’ wellbeing, and human-animal interaction.
We came up with four proposed solutions after comparing and combining 20 sketches of ideas:
- Concept 1, what does the pet say, is a mobile app that helps people to understand theirs dogs better by recording their behavior.
- Concept 2 is a smart collar that can monitor dogs’ mental health.
- Concept 3, doggo, is a mobile app that help dogs make friends.
- Concept 4 is to help dogs have healthier and more appropriate diet.
Our choice
After running the proposed solutions with others, we decided to go with Concept 3: Doggo. Dogs can’t speak for themselves, and most of the time the causes of mental health problems are the same for humans, so it’s up to us to take care of their emotional well-being and create a healthy living environment. That’s why we chose to improve dogs’ mental health through socialization.
Prototyping
Doggo is a mobile app that uses AI to help dogs find potential good friends by matching their profile, and supports dog owners to arrange and join offline events together with their dogs. It has the following benefits:
- Create a better social environment for dogs
- Encourage the socialization to improve dogs’ wellbeing
- Create more opportunities for dogs and their owners to communicate and spend more time with each other
- Help dog owners to meet more people who have dogs in their community
Key paths
- Find a dog friend;
- Create activities and invite friends;
- Write a feedback after the activity.
First feature: smart matching
Doggo matches dogs’ profiles using artificial intelligence. At first, Doggo will prompt the user to create a detailed profile of the dog and the AI algorithm will work in the background to match potential dog friends and suggests them on the next welcome screen. The user can choose add them to the friend list so that they can invite them to your activities or join their activities.
Second feature: create/join activities
In the Activities page, the user can create their own activities by clicking the top left button, or join other activities by browsing More Activities section. When an activity is scheduled, a reminder will show up on the top of the screen.
Third feature: feedback system
Matching is a quite subjective thing, so we have to always listen to our users — both dogs and humans. So we created a feedback system to let users rate and comment on their experience after each activity. We will then use the feedback to train our algorithm model to generate better matches overall. You can give feedback directly in the chat with Doggo Bot.
Learnings
We received a bunch of great feedback from user testing and one of them is that they are more willing to arrange the activity with friends by sending messages because that’s a more natural way. Another valuable feedback is that they wanna be able to apply visibility filters on specific friends when creating an activity to avoid awkward situations.
One great lesson we’ve learned from this design sprint is that you have to learn to give up on some ideas and be mindful of constraints. You only have limited time (5 days) and resources, so it’s quite important to not going for a perfect solution but rather a sufficient one. Also, more competitive analysis on similar products will make sure that our features don’t overlap with existing solutions on the market.
