THE TEAM
Delivered in my position as Senior Product Designer at Mad Paws, in close collaboration with my product manager, tech lead and engineers in my scrum team.
MY ROLE
UX/UI
User Interviews
Prototyping
Metrics and Optimisation
DATE
June 2022 – February 2023
Pets are as individual as their owners. To match pets with sitters Mad Paws needed a Pet Profile that captured this complexity.
Background
Mad Paws is Australia’s largest pet care marketplace.
One of the biggest hurdles for sitters to reach a paid booking is knowing whether they are capable and willing to care for the pet. The existing Pet Profile was basic, forcing sitters to ask repetitive and time-consuming questions to fill knowledge-gaps.
How might we encourage pet owners to provide more information without it feeling like we’re slowing them down?
Challenges
The Add Pet flow happens as part of the main booking flow. We needed to get more information out of owners whilst not negatively affecting conversion.
Through our interviews, sitters also expressed concern about owners’ willingness to provide so much information.
“A lot of owners are very impatient. They only care about getting their dog looked after. They don’t want to fill out their profiles.”
Key Info
Behaviour
Walks
Meals
Health
Homelife
De-risking through empathy
We completed 18 user tests with owners and sitters. Sitters told us what information they needed and owners reacted to the new Add Pet flow.
Sitters
- Loved the behavioural information on the new Pet Profile (energy levels, difficult behaviours)
- Felt the added detail would help them provide better care
- Liked ‘owner’s notes’ section as this allowed for greater detail
- Doubted owners’ motivation to fill out so much information
- Doubted owners’ honesty in answering questions
Owners
- Happy to fill out detailed information about their pet
- Felt like this will ensure customised care
- Found the length of the pet creation long, but understood it was necessary
Information at your paw-tips
Having so much useful information in the new Pet Profile meant real effort had to be made to make it digestible and easily accessible for sitters.
Chunked sized screens
A tabbed system breaks the profile into easy-to-navigate sections.
No labels
Unnecessary words or elements were removed. Labels added to clutter rather than increasing comprehension. Adios!
Care cards
Sitters access the profile to see care information during pet sits. Care cards hero this information at the top of the meals, walks and health tabs.
In the owner’s words
Sitters valued the nuance that owners could add to certain sections, such as separation anxiety. A consistent component with a solid background visually cues sitters to where owners have written.
A pivot to protect conversion
When I joined the project, the add pet flow had already been designed and was 38 screens long.
It had been tested with owners, but not in the context of a booking enquiry, where owners need to add their pets.
I advocated to split the flow into five smaller flows to match the tabs in the profile that I had designed. Only the key information would be required at booking enquiry. Testing this with owners confirmed that they would tolerate this shorter flow within the booking flow.
Old add pet
63.5%
Contact CTA on Sitter Profile > Enquiry
6 minutes
Contact CTA on Sitter Profile > Enquiry
28.4%
Enquiry > Approval
New add pet
63%
Contact CTA on Sitter Profile > Enquiry
7.2 minutes
Contact CTA on Sitter Profile > Enquiry
33%
Enquiry > Approval
Despite adding more screens to the flow, owners converted approximately at the same rate. This was a win as the additional information helps sitters understand the owner’s pet. It’s also led to improved conversion at the bottom of funnel (enquiry to approval).
“I’m actually gonna give you a compliment on this one and it’s that you guys changed the pet profile and put all those specific things like behaviour. It’s absolutely brilliant. It’s absolutely necessary.”
Reflections
The mid-build pivot to breaking up the Add Pet flow into five was necessary but not ideal. How a flow will affect conversion needs to be considered from the beginning of the design process.
As a side-effect of this pivot, the ‘key info’ section of the new Pet Profile is the only mandatory one. As a result, completion of the enriched Pet Profile (walks, meals, health and homelife) is lower than we’d like. Moving forward, feature adoption needs to be considered and scoped.
On reflection, a smaller Pet Profile with less information would have balanced better the sitter’s need for information with the owner’s motivation to fill that profile out.
Next steps
We hope to increase Pet Profile completion in future by prompting owners to fill it out on relevant screens in our product.
It is my hypothesis that owner motivation will be highest just before a confirmed booking, as that is when they are most concerned with their pet’s care being successfully completed.
We also want to allow sitters to request Pet Profile completion, a feature that was in the original design but descoped for the first release.