THE TEAM
Delivered in my position as Senior Product Designer at Mad Paws, in close collaboration with my product manager, tech lead and engineers.
MY ROLE
UX/UI Design
User Interviews
Prototyping & User Testing
DATE
October 2023 – Present (ongoing)
The aging Mad Paws app was in need of some serious grooming. The reboot sought to reinstate the app as leader of the pack.
Teaching an old dog new tricks
The old Mad Paws app was built using an aging architecture that was becoming increasingly difficult to bug-fix and support.
The app is the preferred way for sitters to interact with Mad Paws (nearly double the daily users than web), but we received constant negative feedback:
- Many screens took users out of the app to their mobile browsers, forcing them to log in again (#1 complaint)
- Frequent sitter complaints about app glitches and reliability
- Ionic code base was outdated and hard for developers to read and debug
“I didn’t have any success with the app. I found it quite glitchy and kept taking me off the app.”
Delivered one screen at a time
As a team, we decided on releasing the app with only the three key screens built natively (messages, bookings, calendar) in order to reduce initial scope and get the app to market faster.
All other screens loaded the web version of the platform in an in-app browser. This solved our number one user issue by allowing users to access all parts of the product without leaving the app or having to log-in again.
Post release we delivered new screens one-by-one, creating more frequent releases with targeted testing and user feedback.
Below are the screens and features that I was responsible for:
Bookings
- Bookings are now sorted into pending, upcoming, past and archived categories.
- Features the ‘Booking card’, a design element that appears on other screens in the app such as message threads.
Booking details
- Dynamic ‘next step’ CTAs above the fold depending on status of booking (ie. pending, paid, completed, etc). Previously these core ‘next steps’ were often missed because they were provided in subtle icon buttons with no text description.
- Easy access to secondary screens – Pet Profile, Sitter Profile, Price Breakdown.
- Addition of map for services with directions button.
Edit booking
- Price updates as edits are made.
- Easily edit bookings with generous tap targets.
- Reachability in mind with CTAs in lower half of screen.
Payment
- Introduction of Apple Pay and Gpay payment options.
- If emergency contact or credit card has been previously provided, the inputs of this are condensed to remove complexity of screen.
Search for a sitter
- Guided multi-step search experience to limit cognitive-load.
- Built with generous touch targets and easily reached CTAs.
- Introduction of ‘recent search’ function – a requested pet owner feature.
Message thread improvements
- Booking card with quick action buttons now shown within the chat. Previously users had to leave chat to see the booking details providing a disjointed experience.
- If there have been multiple bookings with the same owner and sitter, those bookings are accessed easily by horizontally swiping.
- Multi-photo upload enabled, a highly requested feature.
Reflections
The staggered go-to-market approach has been an excellent way to deal with a rebuild. If we had attempted to redesign and deliver all the screens at once, we would have greatly pushed back the release date and missed all that time receiving user feedback. We’ve also learnt more and more as we’ve gone along, so it’s allowed for iterative learning.
What personally has been gratifying is receiving unprompted positive feedback about the app in user interviews, often when the app wasn’t even the topic of conversation. We are seeing growth in our booking by repeat customers and I believe that the app is part of that growth.
“All I can say is that the current app is a big improvement from the previous app that was really, really confusing and slow.”
“I appreciated the last release that had quite, quite material changes that made the user experience a lot more, you know, usable, which was great.”
What’s next
We have been focussed on delivering a native app experience for post booking request (messaging, edit, calendar, payment, etc).
Now that that has been achieved, we want to focus on the pre booking request (search, make booking request) for new pet owners. We believe that the app represents an opportunity to improve new customer conversion due to it’s more refined and mobile-friendly experience, and will promote it heavily to these users as soon as that part of the app is built.