From overwhelmed to empowered: UX Design for a better cause

Role: Sr. UX/UI Designer

UX Design

AI-Integration

Every year 6.5 million animals end up in shelters across America.

Less than half get adopted.

Animals with bios are 10X more likely to get adopted than those without.

Every year 6.5 million animals end up in shelters across America.

Less than half get adopted.

Animals with bios are 10X more likely to get adopted than those without.

That's where AI can help

As Sr. UX/UI Designer, I was tasked with constructing a simple and direct interface for a groundbreaking innovation.

Challenge

With a tight timeline and low budget we had only a matter of weeks to pull it off.

We had only 6 weeks total to conceive of, design, code and deploy the product which meant that we had to be agile and move fast. UX research had to be done in a matter of days instead of weeks and we had no time for dead ends.

Seek first to understand...

I conducted research into the emotional needs of the target user.

Who is it for?

• This tool's primary audience is shelter staff.

• Shelters are primarily staffed by volunteers which means they are emotionally invested in being there.

• Shelters are typically under-funded non-profits with outdated hardware

Where are they, emotionally?

• Most shelter staff are not being paid to be there or if they are, it's not very much which means they are emotionally invested in the well-being of the animals .

• They likely feel ill-equipped to help with regards to the creativity it takes to come up with engaging bios for hundreds of pets.

What do they need?

• Shelter staff face a number of hurdles on a daily basis including exposure to suffering and trauma.

•In addition to physical challenges, they face operational and logistical challenges like understaffing and limited resources.

• They need something to make their life just a little bit easier.

Distilling the research down to 3 principles

SIMPLICITY

The job was to make an experience that was dead simple to use and would take less than 1 minute to go through.

MOBILE–FIRST

The experience had to work on any device - especially smaller screens or outdated monitors as shelters do not have up-to-date hardware.

MAXIMIZED OUTPUT

To ensure success, people needed to get what they need from as little input as possible - which meant little to no typing.

Sometimes the best interfaces are the simplest ones.

I chose to limit the user’s choices and rely as little on typing as possible, preferring checkboxes and dropdowns so that overworked shelter staff do not have to labor over anything. I designed the web app to function entirely on a tablet or smaller-screened computers.

It had to adopt the established look and feel of PetSmart’s digital styleguide

Efficiency through a unified design system

We used a unified design system to speed up UI design with a clear and concise framework that fits within PetSmart's design system

AI Engine

The secret lay in the prompt-writing which focused more on what NOT to say than what TO say. After several iterations of AI tweaking, it was finally ready for prime time. I cannot paste the the prompting here as it is proprietary.

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