Ozzy Application Design
Case Study
Ozzy is a mobile platform designed to help individuals manage veterinary care for their pets. The platform allows users to maintain their pets medical records, manage medications, and organize important information for visits to the veterinarian.
UX/UI Design, UX Research, Branding
Role:
Timeline:
8 Weeks
Figma, Google Docs
Tools:
Project Overview
For this project, I addressed a seemingly prevalent issue faced by pet owners—managing their pets' veterinary information and care independently. Through extensive secondary and user research, I explored the challenges and nuances of veterinary care, affirming its significance and potential impact. Over the course of approximately 8 weeks, I utilized my user research, UX design and branding skills to develop a mobile-first platform that empowers pet owners to navigate their pets' veterinary care with ease.
Empower pet owners by providing a user-friendly platform for independently managing their pets' medical records, enhancing transparency and accessibility in their pet care journey.
Incorporate industry practices for maintaining organized medical records within the platform, ensuring ease of use and peace of mind for users.
Streamline appointment scheduling and reminders to help pet owners stay organized and never miss important veterinary visits.
Explore features that allow for personalized profiles each pet, including medical history, vaccinations, and treatment plans, to facilitate tailored veterinary care and decision-making.
Business Goals
Process
Research
Discover the problems pet owners are currently experiencing in regard to veterinary care.
Determine what processes a new pet owner goes through when researching veterinary information for their pet.
Understand the biggest issues a pet owner experiences when trying to make a veterinary appointment for their pet.
Determine what the most vital and hardest to remember information is for pet owners regarding their pets veterinary care.
Research Goals
In order to help keep my research user oriented, I wanted to first acknowledge my own assumptions and knowledge around the veterinary industry. Doing this allowed me to set these assumptions aside to focus my research and findings on actual user experiences.
I then put together a research plan to help keep my research focused on specific goals and objectives.
Research Plan
Once I had clear goals to accomplish with my research, I began the process of researching the industry and competitors.
Diving Into The History of The Veterinary Industry
The veterinary business is a rapidly-modernizing industry that has made large pushes towards a more modern, human-like approach to medicine. Knowing this, I wanted to get a better idea of how this modernization started and which companies were leading this push. To do this I put together a brief history of the veterinary industry.
After gaining a better understanding of the history of the veterinary industry, I moved onto researching industry leaders and any possible competitors to see what other companies were offering their users.
Secondary Research
Competitive Analysis
Petdesk is a veterinary application which allows owners to connect with their veterinarians software to review medical records, make appointments, and request medication refills. This product requires the user’s veterinary clinic to purchase the software for the clinic overall.
Anipanion is a Veterinary Telehealth platform founded in 2018. Anipanion primarily focuses on offering veterinary practices the ability to perform telehealth appointments, although they do provide multiple other resources on their website for pet owners and veterinary staff. Similar to PetDesk, this product requires the user’s veterinary clinic to integrate the software, the user cannot use it independently.
VitusVet is a veterinary software company founded in 2013. They focus on offering both owners and practices resources to maintain pet medical records. Owners are able to create “profiles” for their pets allowing them to keep track of medical information. Just like Anipanion and PetDesk, VitusVet requires the user’s veterinary clinic to integrate the software.
Based on my competitive analysis, there is a clear lack of applications that allow owners to independently maintain their pets medical records. Most, if not all of the companies I looked into required the users veterinary clinic to integrate the software. This leaves users that go to not-so-advanced veterinary practices behind.
For my interview process I chose to sit down with actual pet owners instead of any veterinary staff so I could get a true idea of what managing a pet’s veterinary care might look like for the average user.
Once I had felt like I recruited a diverse enough set of users, I sat down and began the interview process. These interviews went particularly well, as all of my participants were able to guide themselves through the story of their pets and their pets veterinary care with little to no prompting from my end.
After learning valuable information about people, their pets, and their pets' medical care, I sat down and relayed all of the information I had from recordings of my interviews into paragraph format. I then whittled this information down further into bullet points containing the key insights from each interview.
Going through the information several times over helped me see trends that were forming in the data I had received from my interviews.
Two out of three of my interview participants mentioned struggling to remember veterinary appointments they had scheduled or were supposed to schedule. With this information I decided I wanted to keep this problem top of mind while designing the application.
User Research
Empathize
To better empathize with the needs of the user, I put together two user personas with similar needs to the needs I had discovered during the user research process. I decided to make two personas so I could see the diversity of needs between users and cover all of the needs I wanted to see in these personas.
User Personas
Pov’s & HMW’s
To continue the process of empathizing with the user and their needs, I next formed some POV statements and HMW questions so that I was sure the focus of the project was centered around the needs of the user.
User Flows & Task Flows
After forming the POV statements and HMW questions, I had spent so much time centering the project around the user and their needs that it was beginning to feel as though the project was guiding itself. With this, I moved onto putting together the flows that users would go through on the application.
Design
After developing the processes the user would go through, I was ready to develop a design and brand identity for the application.
I started by gathering inspiration from other veterinary websites and veterinary apps and put this together into one document. I then proceeded to develop some ideas for a application name and logo. I knew I wanted the name and logo to be casual and focused more around the pet and their owner instead of being too clinical and medically focused.
I opted to name the application after one of my closest canine friends whose name of course is Ozzy. After deciding on a name, I then moved to my sketchbook and started to see what I could do with the logo. After a few sketches I came up with the idea of giving the name “Ozzy” a few animalistic features. I took this idea to Figma and developed a few logo ideas.
The first few logos I was clearly a little overzealous with the animal features. After dialing the details back a little bit I was able to develop a logo that looked nice, felt casual, but communicated the applications theme.
Mood Board
The wireframing process for this project was pretty straightforward as I had spent some quality time on my sketching. Once I had my initial wireframes together I began to add color and detail to each of the wireframes. The process of choosing a color palette for the design was actually much more difficult than I had expected. This was mostly due to the fact that the majority of the colors I was trying in the design either felt too clinical or too casual. I finally settled on a few different shades of blue because it made the design feel modern and professional while also keeping the design calm.
Wireframing
Sign In
Homepage
Visit Planner
Pet Profile
Visit Planner
Record Request
Menu
Pet Profile
Visit Planner
Visit Planner
Record Request
Sign Up
Sign In
Visit Summary
After going through the process of wireframing and finally deciding on a color palette I put together a style guide and UI kit.
This guide contained the organized style elements for the application including typography styles and color palette. It also contained the essential UI components for the application, which consisted primarily of the different buttons necessary for the application.
UI Kit and Style Guide
Prototype and Testing
After iterating on my wireframes several times over I started to feel proud of my design and truly see the potential. In my previous project I spent some extra time on the prototype and I felt as though it made the experience of testing the product much more realistic for the participant. I knew I wanted to do the same for this project with and therefore used a solid block of my time putting together a prototype that would allow the participant to feel like they were actually on a usable app.
After I had this prototype together I began to recruit participants for testing. I wanted to test the product on real pet owners and so I recruited four participants, each of which was a current pet owner. I came up with four tasks total for each participant to do, each of which bringing the participants through different sets of screens. The tasks for each test were as follows:
First Task: Sign Into or Sign up for the Ozzy Platform with email.
Second Task: Plan a new visit for Dolly scheduled for February 3rd. Request an automatic record request for this visit.
Third Task: Plan a new visit for Dolly scheduled for February 3rd. Request a reminder to request records one day after the visit.
Fourth Task: Plan a new visit for Dolly that has not yet been scheduled. Request a reminder to schedule a visit in 24 hours. DO NOT request an automatic record update but rather a reminder to request records one day after the visit.
As soon as I had decided which tasks I wanted participants to complete it was time to begin testing. For each test I recorded audio while also taking notes on each task the participant was completing. After completing testing, I took these audio recordings and whatever notes I had for each task and organized these into bullet point syntheses. Once I had all of the information pulled from testing laid out, it became much easier to see and connect common ideas that could be turned into iterations for the design.
Usability Testing Results
For the first task, there were seemingly little to no issues. The one thing I would like to research and consider is the SSO design. Although this user would like to see consistency of SSO options during the sign up process, I’m not entirely sure if this is standard or necessary. More research into the design standards regarding SSO will ultimately be beneficial for both this project and future projects as SSO’s become increasingly more common in the industry.
For the second task, the ability to click anywhere on the pet summary for “Dolly” to advance to the Pet’s Profile should be considered. Finally, between the third and fourth tasks, almost all participants expressed concerns with regards to the buttons to advance/complete the task and their consistency or lack thereof on other pages. Time should be taken to sit down and consider button placement and design as well as ensuring the buttons are consistent with the other advance/complete buttons in the design.
Revisions
Overall I was incredibly happy with the final outcome of this project. Being one of the first end-to-end mobile projects I worked on, I learned many valuable lessons from this project. One of the bigger takeaways I had from this project was the value of everyday consumption of other UX/UI projects and their related design elements. Taking a few moments everyday throughout this project to search for inspiration ultimately helped me to continue to push my design further and further, making the product both more visually appealing and more easily usable. Another big lesson I learned from this project was the importance of distancing your personal experience from that of the user. Given the experience I have with the veterinary industry, I knew I had to be mindful of this from the start of the project. By the end of the project I understood how much my personal experience and assumptions can influence not only the research process but also the end product and its features. If I had more time to continue to work on this project, I would first retest my prototype following my iterations. I would then explore opportunities to expand features of the application. Specifically I would like to explore options for including additional prompts that get more detailed as the user answers questions about their vet visit allowing for an even easier time at the vet. Finally I would perform more user research to determine if any other features should be explored to meet different users needs.