Walkabout Dog Walking Product Case Study
Role
UI/UX & Branding
Contributors
Brook Wells (Senior Designer & Illustrator)
Walkabout app is a mobile application that easily and simply connects dog owners with local dog walkers. The challenge was to design the mobile application to be user friendly and help dog owners gain some peace of mind by providing them an easy to use platform to reach reliable dog walkers.
Problem Statement
Problem is pretty simple. Owners are too busy sometimes and need a service that is reliable, not expensive and a dog walker they can trust.
Research
Research is very important in the process for product design. Collecting examples of what the current market has is important as you can pick and choose what you think works and does not work. What i would look into was the visual style, brand and flow.
The next stage of the process was the wire frame stage. They first started as very low fidelity sketches with the goal being to put my ideas down without worrying about bad design or ideas. This is then followed through with more high fidelity wireframes to get a much better idea of the overall design before moving to the final visual stage.
Wireframes
Simple was the goal. Have plenty of white space so the user has plenty of room the breath visually for each screen. The red catches the eye and helps direct the user for going to the next screen or highlights anything that is important.
Visual Design
Illustration
For the dog walking brand i created custom illustrations. The illustrations style is simple, fun, quirky and has personality.
Putting together the prototype and testing it has led to some issues that need to be fixed. The first issue was some of the animations not working or just be implemented the wrong way. The main problem to do with type hierarchy. The flow to book the dog walker was simple enough that everyone understood what to do. One thing that I added in was a booking a date on a calendar.
Prototyping and Testing
Self Reflection
What I have learned is sometimes what you do the first time is never the right decision and you might have to go back to figure out another solution again and again till it works right. The design process matters. Going from A, B to C helps in the long run for the process.