PetCo
How might we make it easy for pet owners to find credible services and products for their pets?
Team
Eva Regelski Faith Park Margaret Payne
Role
Researcher, Designer, Tester
Timeline
3 week sprint
Tools
Figma
Procreate
G-Suite
Trello
Deliverables
Two high fidelity prototypes and service blueprint.
Client Brief
PetCo wanted to improve the management of their appointments to meet social distancing and keep up with telehealth appointments. They were looking to build upon their current platform for desktop with a mobile component that helps their clients manage time, place, location, and appointments when they are ready to attend their appointment. PetCo wanted an intuitive interface for both the client and employee. Keeping the user at the center of this process means giving them access and information about reliable and accredited providers that they can trust to care for their pet.
Business Needs
An app that helps PetCo clients manage time, place, location and appointments.
User Goals
Reliable and accredited providers that they can trust to care for their pets.
Problem
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PetCo customers need a more efficient way to find credible services and products for their pets so that they can easily know their pets are safe.
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PetCo employees need a way to easily communicate with pet owners and access their notes so that they can provide high quality service.
Research
Discovering the problem
Methods Used: Competitive and Comparative Analyses, Current App Analysis, HEART Metrics, User Interviews, Affinity Mapping
Not all of the methods we used will be discussed in this case study.
In order to understand the needs of current pet owners and users of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, we conducted 6 user interviews. After conducting interviews, we created an affinity map which allowed us to identify 4 main takeaways:
Current App Analysis
Now that we had an idea of what users were looking for, we wanted to take a look at the current PetCo app to see if user needs were being met.
Homepage Inconsistency
The homepage images you see here are from 2 different users that have both entered the information needed to create a PetCo profile in their app. However, the one on the left does not have a pet profile section and shows a lot of unused space and the inconsistency of the current homepage.
Booking Process
This next screen shows the process of scheduling a grooming appointment. While booking the appointment in the app, there is no way of viewing stylists reviews, which our user interviews revealed is the main way customers choose a service provider.
Appointment Adjustments
This screen is the confirmation received after booking an appointment. This shows how users are unable to cancel or adjust their appointment in the app. Instead, they have to call to change or cancel the appointment.
Understanding the Users
In an effort to learn more about the needs and concerns of our targeted users, I developed two proto-personas as a guide for our redesign.
Customer Persona
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Names: Maeve and her dog, Bingo
Age: 32
Location: Pittsburgh
Occupation: Teacher
Frustrations:
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Can't find reviews recently
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Navigating confusing technology
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Feeling anxious about Bingo's safety
As a new Pittsburgh resident, Maeve needs to find a new groomer for her dog, Bingo. She wants to make sure Bingo gets the best care that she can find, especially because Bingo can get anxious and struggle during grooming. Maeve doesn't have a lot of free time to do research and talk to employees. She needs an easy process to find credible and trustworthy service providers so that she doesn't have to spend too much of her time searching the internet or worrying about Bingo.
Employee Persona
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Name: Phil
Age: 25
Location: Pittsburgh
Occupation: Groomer at PetCo
Frustrations:
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Finds CRM systems confusing
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Hates wasting his time
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When pet owners fail to disclose important info about their pets
Phil is a skilled groomer at PetCo. He’s been working there for over a year now and loves getting to interact with all kinds of furry friends. Even though he’s very good at grooming, he doesn’t really like to deal with the tech and data management side of things and he dislikes it when owners don’t communicate things properly. He would rather skip that so he can spend more time doing what he loves. Phil needs a way to easily find information about the pets he's grooming and an easy way to contact owners so that he can provide the best service possible.
Service Blueprint
The key for our service design for grooming appointments was to address our user needs and the business needs at the same time.
Below is our service blueprint for the process of Maeve booking a grooming appointment, all the way to her picking Bingo up from the appointment.
Increase Brand Trust
The first thing to note here is that Maeve will book her grooming appointment in the app with a groomer she finds credible, like Phil. She can also input Bingo’s details so that Phil will know of any important info up front. This will allow Maeve to feel safer leaving Bingo, which will increase brand trust for PetCo on the business end of things.
Align with COVID-19 Policies
Phil can also send a message to Maeve when he’s ready for the appointment. This will help to eliminate foot traffic in the shop while COVID is still rampant and will ease customers. This will also help PetCo align with their COVID-19 policies and procedures better.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Phil can send pictures and messages through the CRM system as a text message directly to Maeve’s phone in order to give helpful updates about Bingo during the appointment. Streamlining communication like this will be helpful to customers, employees, as well as the business, which will hopefully see an increase in customer satisfaction.
Sketching
After designing the service, we started sketching some of the main pages of our app to complement the grooming service.
We decided that both the customer portal and the employee portal will live inside the same app, so with your specific login, it will take you to the correct portal. So these sketches will end up being the core of both of the experiences.
Going back to our problem statements, we started to think about ways we can make it easy for users to find credible services for their pets, as well as giving employees an easy way to communicate with pet owners and access their notes so they can provide the highest quality service.
Prototype
Customer Experience
Rescheduling an Appointment
For the customer portal, we wanted to make it really obvious on the home page when they have an upcoming appointment. We also wanted to make it super easy to reschedule or cancel your appointment within the app.
This feature will be helpful to people like Maeve who are very busy and whose schedule moves around a lot.
Stylist Profiles
I took the lead on creating stylist profiles that you can view when picking a stylist. I implemented a rating and review system, as well as a way to view the groomer's previous work. This will help bring some trust and credibility to the process of choosing a stylist.
Choosing a Date & Time
I also wanted to create a seamless way to choose the date and time for appointments. I wanted to give people the option to have a monthly view of the calendar, however, the default is the weekly view as that is what most users preferred. This page went through a few iterations which will be discussed later in the case study.
Employee Experience
Now moving onto some of the key features we designed for the employee portal of the app...
Viewing Pet Information
We designed the home page to show the employees schedule for the day, as well as give quick ways to message pet owners directly and view important pet information such as if they struggle during grooming, have any allergies, or just their size and breed. Pet owners input this information when they make a pet profile in the app. The video above shows what the pet info pop up window looks like.
Messaging Pet Owners
Here, you'll see an example of how to message pet owners directly from the home page. Employees can also access all messages from the messages tab on the bottom navigation bar.
Usability Testing
Following the wireframes, we conducted usability tests for both the customer and employee prototypes. We conducted the tests with the mid-fidelity, grayscale versions of the above prototypes so that color and images did not influence how people found the usability of the app. We had 6 testers for both the customer and employee portals.
Customer Usability Tasks
First, we asked our testers to complete three tasks for the customer side, which consisted of booking a grooming appointment with a groomer that they would feel safe leaving their pet with, changing the time of the appointment from 9 am to 11:45 am, and speaking to a vet quickly on video.
Employee Usability Tasks
Then, we assigned four employee usability tasks which were needing to prepare for a grooming appointment with Bingo by learning more about him, sending a message to Maeve to bring Bingo into PetCo for his appointment, clocking into work, and viewing appointments for March 17th.
Usability Testing Results
6 User Tests
For the customer tasks, a couple of users stated they liked the easy navigation when making the grooming appointment but had difficulty choosing dates and times. They also mentioned how choosing a stylist was also small and hard to make a selection.
The common issues that arose from the employee tasks were searching for the time clock and confusion from the home button being located in the middle instead of the left side.
Iterations
Stylist Selection
Customer Portal
After taking the usability tests into consideration, we made these iterations on our mid-fidelity grayscale prototype before we built out the final high-fidelity version. On the screens below, the stylist selection was updated from a dropdown list, which people found hard to use, to a scrolling selection.
Date & Time
Customer Portal
Here, the time and date for booking the grooming appointment was updated as users found the monthly calendar difficult to view on a phone, however the calendar remained as an option in the top right hand corner if users wanted to use that feature.
Home Button
Employee Portal
For the employee experience, we made iterations for the home button to be located to the left side to remain consistent with formatting.
High-Fidelity Usability Testing
After creating our hi-fi prototype, we conducted a second round of usability tests with the full-color version of our app. We tested 3 users and the data collected from the tests allowed us to make iterations for our final prototype. All of the color versions of the app in this case study were part of the final prototype, with all of these iterations already completed, but I want to point out a couple of key changes we made after the high fidelity usability testing.
Customer Reiterations
We made fonts bigger for the home screen because users mentioned it was hard to see. Then the second screen includes the addition of “Your appointment has been booked!” showing confirmation as users mentioned they would like a confirmation instead of only a Back to Home page.
Employee Reiterations
For the employee experience, we changed the color for the time clock under scheduling to pop out more since users had difficulty finding the time clock. We received feedback that the names for pet owners and pets were confusing as some pets have human names, so we adjusted the names to differentiate pet owners from pets.
Next Steps
After all of our research and iterations, we still have a couple of next steps that we would like to take given if we have more time and resources.
For curbside pickup, we would research reasons why people aren’t using curbside more often and hopefully incorporate the data to make efficient changes to the app.
For rescheduling, we would include previously selected appointment times since the current rescheduling process does not showcase this.
Third, we have not seen the employee app from PetCo and we are sure there is more researched data and info in the original app that we would like to compare with ours and make necessary additions as well.
Lastly, we would make the app adaptable to bigger screens because the original PetCo app displays the screen size as a mobile screen size when opened on the ipad.
Thanks for Reading!
With this app and service redesign, we hope to allow users to put their trust in Petco for their pets. We believe that following the different changes made from research, this will increase the rate of returning customers and for users in services as well.