Bark Booker
Centralizing dog care all in one app
Project Overview
​This was the first group project of the Ohio State's UX bootcamp program. Our goal was to brainstorm a problem that a majority of users face. We decided to focus towards dog care since there is a large market for dog services.
Problem
​Pet owners struggle with tedious, multi-app booking and finding trustworthy caretakers for their dogs. How can we simplify this process, ensuring quick bookings, ideal dates, and reliable companies?
Solution
Dog owner's tend to have busy workdays and other tasks they need to accomplish that get in the way of taking care of their dog. They rely heavily on reliable dog care services from caregivers they can trust. The solution was to streamline dog owners' scheduling and offer dependable caregiving options all in one centralized app.
User Interviews
During the empathy phase of the project, I conducted user interviews to build new personas and to inform the design. Together with the team, we prepared an interview script with 20 open-ended questions, focusing on dog owner's frustrations with current dog services and which services were most popular. In 4 days, I recruited and interviewed several users remotely. The majority of users that were interviewed had these priorities for scheduling dog care in common:
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The ability to have all scheduling services in one place of an app
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Finding trustworthy caregivers for their pets
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Having optimal appointment availability
“My dogs are older and my children have all moved out of the house. I need a reliable caregiver that I can trust in my home as well as with my dogs.”
-Theresa, proud dog owner
Survey Results
To better understand how users currently plan and schedule their dog servicing needs, our team conducted a six questions survey. The demographics of this survey were users ages ranging from 22-60 that are current dog owners.
Defining the User
Conducting both user interviews and surveys helped outline how users felt towards existing dog services and what qualities were needed to gain trust from users.
The majority of participants that were interviewed had these priorities for scheduling dog care in common:
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Live communication with caregivers

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Having optimal appointment availability

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Being able to have scheduling dog services all in one place

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Finding trustworthy caregivers for their pets
The Problem
Pet owners struggle with tedious, multi-app booking and finding trustworthy caretakers for their dogs. How can we simplify this process, ensuring quick bookings, ideal dates, and reliable companies?
Illustrating the Problem
To creatively show a step-by-step of the problem at hand, I created a storyboard that graphically displays what our user, Erin, is facing. A storyboard helps define each step of the users thought process when stumbling upon our app idea, and how it can benefit the user.
Information Architecture
In this stage of the UX process it was important out team collaborated on how we wanted our user to interact with our new app. We empathized with the user, defined the problem, now need to create the blueprint of the app that portrays the path we want the user to take.
Specific features included in the user flow included:
The ability to choose all dog service options, a chat option to communicate with the caregiver in real-time to ensure trust, and a "reviews" section on each company's employees to provide credibility. We also wanted to make sure at the ending of booking an appointment, the user had an option to review/ edit if necessary.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
User Testing
Before adding IOS components and creating our finalized high fidelity version, our team set up a user testing plan to make sure out outline of our app was easy to understand and navigate. Several users were recorded and interviewed via zoom, where they talked us through our process.
User test tasks:
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Create an account
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Choose a dog care service
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Choose servicing accommodations
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Search caregiver options
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Book appointment
User test feedback:
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Need a home button or “back to start” option
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Make scheduling links bigger
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Make a button to sync to calendar
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Easy way to view previous bookings
Final Product
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Next Steps
In summary, working within a team of UX designers requires effective communication and collaboration. Our group organized our weekly schedule by conducting standup meetings and assigned design tasks through Trello to help with organization. It was great how each team member had strengths in different phases of the design process, allowing us to divide and conquer, then later conclude our findings as a group.
What I've Learned
The future of Bark Booker is limitless in opportunities. We would like to create a space for dog caring businesses to share their services with customers in their very own segment of the app. We would also like to elaborate more on the complete flow of the app to explore all options that aid the user in planning and scheduling.
