Overview

HouseMyDog is an online service that connects dog owners with vetted dog sitters across Ireland and the UK. Like airbnb for dogs.

My Redesign Process

For the redesign, I decided to test both mobile view and desktop view of Hosemydog. As my evaluation methods, I wanted to use 5 methods:

• Empathise – Understand the users.
• Usability Review – Analyse the current process and define pain points.
• Competitive analysis – Compare competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.
• Information Architecture – Content evaluation.
• Ideation - Brainstorm possible solutions.

My Goal

Redesign the website to solve for current pain points, improve the usability and the user experience.

Empathy

There are two types of Housemydog members. Those who want to host their dogs and those who want to became dog sitters. In my case study, I wanted to capture both sides. In order to get me thinking about all the different possibilities of why someone would use Hosemydog, I created a list of possible users, situations, and motivations. This would help me understand the mindset and background of the user’s behaviour, needs and goals.

Personas

Usability Review

The method used to conduct this Usability Review follows a similar methodology outlined by Jakob Nielsen, where a usability professional evaluates a system against a specified list of usability principles or heuristics whilst trying to accomplish a task and record their findings.

In total, 15 usability issues were discovered when evaluating Housemydog two most important tasks. The issues relate to a number of elements across the interface - the most severe of which prevents a user from booking and sending a direct message to the dog sitters, one of the primary functions of Housemydog.

Competitive analysis

I looked at what else is out there. I started with a list of competitors, then moved on to businesses that serve our target audience outside the ecommerce field. I compared competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities and highlighted areas I wanted to draw attention to and features I wanted to avoid.

1. First impression of layout, colours, images
2. Ease of access to navigational links
3. Main contents / pages
4. Ease of access to contact information
5. Accessibility rating (e.g. line spacing, white noise, advert cluster, etc.)

Information Architecture

Solution

First, I made some sketches to quickly visualize my ideas.

Next, I created a Hi-fi prototype.