Designing the onboarding experience for an IoT
smart dog collar
Leverege
2020 UX Result Hackathon
Dylan Drooger, Celine Fucci,
Kristin Nelson
December 2020 -
March 2021
Competitive Analysis, User Research, App Map, Medium & High-fidelity wireframes
As part of the 2020 UX Result Hackathon, our team took on IoT company Leverege's challenge of developing the onboarding experience for a smart dog collar solution.
Dog owners living in urban and rural settings are concerned with their pets' health and safety and use IoT smart collar solutions as a way to keep track of these metrics. Our team set out to understand which health and safety features were most important to users and to develop an easy and intuitive way to set up a smart collar.
Exploring the IoT pet product market
To get a sense of what kind of features existing solutions provided, we looked at a few IoT competitors on the market that offer products related to pets' health and safety. We specifically wanted to explore which health and safety features they offer and the look and feel of each application.
What we learned
Playful & Secure UI
The UI style reflects the playful nature of dogs and the security of what the solution is providing customers.
Focus on health metrics
All competitors focused on health metrics in their product, indicating that this might be something to explore with our users.
Geo-fencing
All of the smart collar solutions we explored use some form of geo-fencing to set up boundaries and keep track of the user's dog.
What do target users need?
With limited time to conduct research during the Hackathon, we decided to conduct a survey to collect information on our users pain points, goals, and motivations.
We sent the survey to 4 different users and learned the following:
Trust in the collar is key
"If I were ever to use a smart collar, I would have to be convinced of its absolute safety and trust its effectiveness." Colleen
Geo-fence products aren't always effective
"(I'm) not that impressed (of geo-fence products), especially for a larger dog, walked right through it." Jeff
GPS and real-time tracking are most interesting features
"I would like activity tracking or GPS tracking collar functions." Abby
Who are we designing for?
From these key research takeaways we developed a user persona that reflected our target audience:
The Safety-Conscious Dog Owner
Goals
Wants to keep track of her dog Juno's location, especially when he's in the yard or on a walk.
Wants to get updates about Juno's health.
Frustrations
Owns a geo-fence, but Juno sometimes walks right through it.
Not being able to trust the health and safety products that she uses with Juno.
What problem are we solving?
Dog owners need a seamless mobile app connected to their dog’s IoT collar because they want to ensure their dogs are safe and healthy.
What design principles should guide our designs?
Our designs should focus be healthy and reflect our commitment to keeping dogs healthy.
Our users should feel confident with our product and feel like they can keep their pets safe.
Our solutions should be intuitive and should be easily integrated into our users everyday lives.
Mapping out our app
Due to the limited timeline of the Hackathon, one of the first things we did after gathering our research was deciding how to map out different user paths. We wanted to have a clear picture of which features we should be focusing on in our designs.
App Map
After mapping out the two main user paths (new and returning user), we started to brainstorm potential concepts. We quickly landed on a few specific areas that we wanted to explore through sketching: the onboarding process, the geo-fence tracking, and the home screen.
My 6-8-5 sketches
We then translated our concepts into mid-fidelity wireframes based on the app map that we created.
Exploring the branding
We then began to explore the branding of the app, based on our research insights. Based on our research we knew that we wanted to focus on style directions that conveyed playfulness, safety, and confidence.
Picking a direction
After nearly 14 hours of work on our concept, we came up with a high-fidelity prototype that we presented as our Hackathon submissions (key screens below).
While our design was selected as a finalist of the Hackathon, but we still felt like there was more work to be done. One of our biggest regrets during the Hackathon was not doing more user testing. We therefore decided to continue the design process in the months following the Hackathon.
We recruited four participants and conducted a UI desirability test and usability tests for our designs. We asked users to complete four different tasks specifically focusing on entering a dog's information, selecting a dog's breeds, setting up a geofence, and visiting the homescreen.
Key Testing Insights
UI Improvements
Some users felt that the logo, color scheme, and illustrations could be improved to fit the app's features better.
Geo-fencing confusion
Users encountered the most difficulties completing the geo-fencing setup, indicating that we can improve this.
Clear process and flow
Overall, users found the onboarding process to be clear, intuitive, and easy-to-use.
With the insights that we collected from our desirability and usability tests, we made some key UX and UI improvements to our existing designs.
UI Improvements
Our users commented on many aspects of the apps UI. The main improvements that they asked for were changes to the color scheme, clearer logo and illustrations.
Selecting Dog Breed
Four out of four of our users wanted more clarity around choosing a dog's breed.
Setting Geo-fence Boundaries
Nearly all users encountered difficulties setting geo-fence boundaries and some users commented on the color scheme.
Home Screen
Users appreciated the home screen and its features. We therefore only made slight adjustments to the layout and UI based on other comments we received.
This was our team's first hackathon experience. While we were happy with what we were able to accomplish in only a day of work, there are a few things that we would do differently next time around:
Do more research
• We would have liked to have conducted user interviews to have had more information before getting into ideating
Incorporate user testing
• We didn't have time to do desirability or usability testing during the actual hackathon, it could have been useful when creating our first high-fidelity prototype
Create additional deliverables
• With the limited time of the hackathon, there are some deliverables that would have been useful to our process (storyboard, user journey map, user flow).
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