Mile High Canine Rescue Application

Every Great Design Begins with an Idea

This application design was based on local dog rescue, Mile High Canine Rescue. MHCR mainly operates through their website and Facebook pages. This application was made from understanding the processes that the rescue does and gives those processes a single platform to operate on.

Role
UI/UX Researcher and

Tools
Figma, FigJam & Pexels

Timeline
08/08/2024-10/05/2024

Research builds the foundation

  • All projects have to start somewhere. Seeing what else is out there before you make a decision on your next project is the best starting point. This also allows you to see what will be competing against your design.

  • User interviews are done to find potential users for your design and allows you to gather any and all information that you will need to start the foundation to your design.

  • This activity is done once all interviews are conducted. Information that is gained from the interviews is sorted and categorized to find the pain points that the designs will focus on.

  • Problem statements are created to get you to start thinking about possible solutions for the pain points that were found from affinity mapping.

  • User personas are created to better understand the perspective of the users, thinking about their motivations, frustrations, needs, and wants.

  • User flows are created to understand how many screens are needed and to give some sort of time frame based on the number of screens. The user flows map out the path that users will go through when using the website or application.

  • The purpose of project goals is to find and understand what the website/application is going to accomplish from the user's end and the business end. These goals also include technical considerations based on target audience.

  • Site Maps are a written navigation based on user flows that will become the navigation bar in the designs.

Problem Statements:

I would like to explore different ways of communication, because there are currently 2-3 different platforms that are being used for communication which is less direct and more time consuming than just using one platform for communication.

I would like to explore ways that lower frustration for fosters when they want to communicate with an adopter and when they want to get a new foster dog posted, because they currently have a very indirect way to get the dog posted and they have to sort through posts on a discussion board in order to see who is wanting to adopt their dog.

Research

  • Competitive Analysis
  • User Interviews
  • Affinity Mapping
  • User Personas
  • User Flows
  • Project Goals
  • Site Map

Now the designing can begin

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

High-Fidelity Wireframes

  • Main Pages for Users

  • User Login/Sign Up

    User Login/Sign Up

  • User Dashboards

  • Fosters' Account Functions

  • Admin's Account Functions

  • Adopter's Account Functions

  • Problem Statement #1 Solution: Direct messaging allows for less frustration and effort that goes into the current process with Facebook pages. Direct messages make sure that all of the adopters get to talk to a foster when finding a dog.

  • Problem Statement #2: The fosters get to make the post for their foster dog, limiting the frustration, time, and misinformation around getting a dog up for adoption. One of the admins add an adoption fee and approves the post.

Testing

User and Usability Testing are an important part of the design process. It gives multiple perspectives and insights that are necessary to create a great design.

Iterations

After

Text Sizing Change

There were multiple changes I made to sizing. The changes were to make the fonts 16pt instead of 15pt.

After

Content Adjustment

I changed a couple items on the Discussions page and the Message board to match what was not already covered by other pages.

Conclusion

Summary

This project’s purpose was to teach me application design. The research for this project was better because it is my fourth project doing research, I also had some insight into some of the problems I tackled before hand.

Highlights

As always, I most enjoyed doing the designs for this project. I enjoyed learning a different way for designing, I had only done website design before, and application design is just slightly different with how you set it up.

Takeaways

This project allowed me to explore application design. This project also taught me how to create a user navigation bar for an application.

Previous

A Peaceful Planet