Pals4Paws
Spreading volunteer opportunities through gamification
Project Overview
Pals4Paws aims to help understaffed animal welfare organizations by providing locals with featured volunteer opportunities.
Participants in the volunteer program receive points as rewards, incentivizing them to engage more actively and strive for advancement to higher tiers within the program.
DURATION
4 days
TYPE
Mobile App
Gamification
Bootcamp group project
MY ROLE
Qualitative Research
User Research
TOOLS
Figma
Canva
Maze
INDUSTRY
Animal care
Volunteer Work
Feature Scoping
Wireframing
User Testing
Created Style Guide
Qualitative Research
6.3 Million companion animals enter the U.S. shelters nationwide every year.
Could you imagine? There are hundreds of dogs and cats who need homes, but due to lack of money and understaffing, most shelters euthanize old, ill, or aggressive animals.
According to a survey by Best Friends Animal Society
87%
of organizations are understaffed
71%
are unable to recruit, hire, and maintain staff
57%
are unable to provide good service adoption/foster support they would like
Interviews to gain insight on the experiences that pet foster parents and rescue volunteers go through when taking care of an animal
We tailored the questions to each group’s specific activities and needs
What was your experience like when fostering animals?
How did you find a pet to foster? How many times have you fostered?
What information did you know about your animal(s) before you fostered them?
What was your intention in fostering a pet?
Did you encounter any issues when fostering?
Did your perspective of animals change after fostering?
What advice would you give to a friend that was thinking about fostering an animal?
What are the different factors to consider before fostering a pet?
Why did you choose to foster instead of adopting or just volunteering at a shelter?
Foster Parents
What was your experience like when volunteering?
How often did you volunteer?
What motivated you to become a volunteer?
What do you find most rewarding about volunteering at a shelter?
Did you find anything difficult about volunteering at a shelter?
How did you locate a shelter to volunteer at?
How do people typically choose their pets?
have people returned pets? if so, why?What do you typically do when you volunteer at the shelter?
What are the biggest issues the place you volunteered at faced?
How were these issues addressed?What areas if any of the shelter systems need attention?
Rescue Volunteers
The interviews revealed that there were 3 major problems
1) Understaffing
"Lack of volunteers mean the pets don’t get pulled from the shelter."
Shelters face severe overcrowding constantly. Because of this, fosters are often overwhelmed because we end up taking on way too many.
2) Overcrowding
"We don’t make enough money on adoptions alone. We are constantly having to ask for donations and raise money in creative ways."
3) Lack of Money
Based on the learnings from this, we chose to focus our solution on staffing shortages since it was the most common trend among our interviewees and had massive data to highlight this issue
Problem Statement
People need easy and attractive access to volunteer opportunities so that understaffed organizations can help more animals in need
How Might We
Make volunteering an easy, rewarding and enjoyable experience?
Allow people to track their progress and volunteer history
Help people see local volunteer opportunities around them
Features on Mid Fidelity Wireframes
Encourage sustained participation by gamifying the experience and fostering a sense of achievement.
GAMIFIED CHALLENGES
Reward users for their engagement and contributions by awarding points and recognizing their progression through various tiers
Streamlines the process of volunteering by providing a one stop shop for people to apply to multiple organizations simultaneously.
UNIFIED VOLUNTEER APPLICATION
Simplifies the burden for volunteers and organizations, eliminating multiple applications and duplicate data entry.
PET SPOTLIGHT
Allows users to view profile of pets in need of assistance
Fosters empathy by allowing users to connect with individual animals, encouraging them to take meaningful action to help those in need
Usability Testing to get quick insights into usability problems
We created a prototype and observed how each user went through the tasks
Task 1: Volunteer for Weekend Warriors. Select the date that best works for you and submit your request to volunteer.
OUTPUT: Due to confusion between the organization name and the location, we've added event descriptions and geo-location tags to make it more distinguishable.
Task 2: How will you check the status of your points you collected over time?
OUTPUT: Our heatmap shows that users were toggling between Profile and Pawgress sections. To enhance clarity and streamline the app’s functionality, we’ve consolidated profile details within the Pawgress section.
UI Kit
We utilized a moodboard to inspire the visual style guide, which we then applied to our high-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototype.
