From Concept to Pilot: Designing and piloting a pet health app

Overview

Nordhealth's goal was to simplify pet care for owners. The solution was a consumer app for pet owners that leveraged clinic data on the Provet Cloud platform and enabled pet owners to manage prescriptions, vaccinations, and appointments.

As the lead designer and product owner, I guided this project from inception to launch, playing a pivotal role in research, competitive analysis, scoping, conceptualising, designing, and branding.

As a member of the technical steering group, I contributed to critical technical decisions and the overall development approach.

Pain Points

Our research revealed two significant challenges faced by veterinary clinics and pet owners:

1. Clinics were burdened with multiple fragmented services for consumer apps, booking services, and patient data access.
2. Pet owners didn't have instant access to medical data and required a straightforward way to book appointments, receive appointment reminders, and manage appointments efficiently.

Project Scope and Design

The project began with speaking to stakeholders, practitioners working in clinics and the in-house team that worked supported clinics directly.

I began a process of requirements gathering and documentation of the app's scope and design.

As always a chunk of the process involved low fidelity sketches and several rounds of iteration, feedback and discussion.

To validate our concept quickly, we initially set out to develop a progressive web app (PWA). However, recognising the importance of notifications for booking reminders, updates, test results, and vaccination reminders, we pivoted to using Flutter to create a cross-platform mobile app.

This was a great move as it allowed us to build a consumer-ready app to be sitting in the app stores and ready to be tested with real clinics within about 3 months.

I documented the design, flows, wrote the user stories and worked hand-in-hand with the developers to build the minimum viable app for trialling with clinics.

We launched the pilot with a small group of clinics to gather real-world feedback from both clinics and patients.

Challenges

One of the gnarliest UX challenges was handling of deceased pets. This required a sensitive and thoughtful approach:

Problem

Some pets might have died during treatment and would have been recorded on the platform as deceased (with a cause of death and date). Long-time pet owners might have pets that passed away outside of the clinic and not had their death recorded.

When using the app a patient would be presented with a historic list of their pets. Those that are marked as deceased could easily be removed from the list but it would be upsetting or even traumatic for somebody to be presented with a list of pets that had died. Especially if this were a recent event.

Solution

The app contained a pet switcher so that someone could switch between pets to make bookings for them or view their medical data.

The switcher was designed to display only recent pets on first view. The only way to use the app was via an invite from a clinic which would be sent after a consultation or visit. Users accessing the app the first timevia an invite from their clinic would naturally only see data for their currently active pet.

Deeper in the app was a complete list of pet history. Those who were presented with a list of pets would be able to select the pets they would like to manage in the app (not remove the pets they don't want to manage in the app).

This approach utilises the endowment effect from behavioural economics, which posits that people ascribe more value to things simply because they own them. By focusing on active pets, we leveraged this effect to create a positive user experience, avoiding the emotional burden of marking pets as deceased.

Strategic Contributions

Throughout the project, I was involved in:

• Defining the scope and strategy
• Drafting detailed specifications and documentation
• Creating user stories and UX deliverables
• Utilising tokens from the Nord Design System to craft a subset of mobile UI assets, ensuring consistency in design and user flows.

The final phase

The Pet Parent App successfully addressed the fragmented service challenge faced by clinics and met the needs of pet owners for an intuitive and efficient way to manage pet care.