For this case study, I've redesign the famous dog walking app and focus primarily on solving trust issues between dog owners and walkers.

Experience the freshly designed dog walking app here

Background

Not all dog owners afford the luxurious time to walk their dogs, so they rely on a friend or hire dog walkers from some platforms. However, trust has always been an issue between dog owners and dog-walking platforms. So, it brings up the questions:

Question #1

What is the solution to gain trust from dog owners?

Question #2

How can we design an experience that ensure dog owners trust whom they pay for?

Hi I’m Ronnie, the UX designer for this project. In the following case study, I will talk about a solution that gains dog owners’ trust at the beginning of the process — onboarding and finding the first walker.

Prior to design

Before the actual design happened, a thorough competitive analysis was conducted. The competitive analysis was an important step as the problem I was trying to solve and most design decisions were derived from it.

Public reviews

By looking at hundreds of public reviews of both Rover and Wag!, there are 4 common trust issues among the complaints:

Bad service quality: dog owners didn’t expect pet sitters to be careless and irresponsible. There was no guarantee of service quality.

Unfulfilled services: pet sitter did not fulfill the required service and ghosted on dog owners.

Cancellation issues: dog owners paid the service but didn’t receive any service fulfillment guarantee, resulting in last-minute cancellation that ruined their plan. Dog owners also face difficulties when they attempt to cancel a service request.

Fake walker profile: dog owners complain that some dog walkers, even though they provide a bad service, still have good opportunities to get hired and no background information was provided to new users.

These findings are enough for the first iteration of the project, so let's talk about my solution.

Solution

The problem was about trust. Therefore, I questioned myself, what are dog owners’ goals? What are their fundamental needs? Also, how can we solve the issues we found in public reviews.

Dog owners want to learn more about the service model and be confident to use our app at the beginning

To tackle this need, an onboarding process was designed. It introduces two highlight of features and a demo that showed how the service model worked.

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Good things about this flow

• It never asked new user to register an account before they get a taste of this app. This is because users are not comfortable of sharing any personal information to unfamiliar services.

• It was designed to get users quickly onboard, gain users trust, and allow them to learn more about the app and its service model.

• It offered a choice to skip intro and demo so users don’t feel they are forced to complete unnecessary tasks.

• It rewards new users for completing the demo and ask them to register at will.

Dog owners want to find reliable and trustworthy walkers who can take good care of their dogs.

There are threes things I focused on to tackle this need.

First, a smooth navigation system leads dog owners to the information they want.

• On the homepage, there is a map that shows nearby walkers. Each avatar serves as a shortcut that leads to an individual walker profile. This is a convenient way for dog owners to access information quickly.

• Dog owners can drag up the grey bar and find a list of walkers, they can also sort the walkers by tapping the tabs on top.

• If these are not enough, dog owners can apply filters on the corner of the screen to narrow down their target.

While the homepage is for dog owners to explore and discover, a search page was designed for those who are busy and less patient.

• On the main screen of search, a few types of service are there for dog owners to quickly get started without typing a single word.

• In case of dog owners want to find a specific walker, they can search walker’s name or ID.

The last thing was a well thought out content strategy that help dog owners quickly identify trustable walkers.

• Each walker card shows only important information that dog owners need to know along with some badges that a walker has earned in past services.

• A “Service Guarantee” badge becomes a primary differentiator that tells which walker guarantees to fulfill the service and minimizes last-minute cancellation.

Dog owners want to learn more about a walker and build some trust before requesting a service.

When dog owners review a walker’s profile, they want the information to be transparent, so they can discover any bad signs of a walker.

In my solution, the following information are included in a walker profile

• “Verified” and “Service Guarantee” badge.

• Quick statistics of the walker

• Availability and calendar

• About or bio

• Badges earned in the past services

• Reviews from other dog owners

• Gallery

Also, online status indicates that the dog owner can directly message a walker for quick inquiries. This is a great way for the owner to connect and gain trust through their conversation with walkers.

What more to expect?

While the solution takes care of trust issues to some degree, it is merely the beginning of a project. There is still more work to do.

• We have onboarding for new users. What about returning users including those who might forget how to use the app?

• Could the onboarding demo be an interactive experience instead of videos?

• Could we support more meaningful content other than walker cards in the discover and search results screen?

• How should we design “Flash service” to make it a hassle-free experience.

• Maybe embracing social networks or dog community is a good way to keep dog owners engaged and loyal to the app. It might also boost the exposure of professional dog walkers. So, where should we include social networking features?

• Reviews are the primary source of truth that dog owners rely on when discovering bad signs of a walker. So, what improvement can we make to the review section in walker’s profile?

• How do we avoid the mistakes that other competitors make when we design request walking service userflow?

  These are problems we should solve in the next few iterations. I’m very excited to keep this project going and accept the challenges. So, stay tuned! More exciting features are coming up!