App: DogBuddy

Four smartphones displaying a mobile app for finding dog walking, sitting, and grooming services in Berlin. The screens show message, search results, service details, and booking request interfaces with options for dog size and service types.

Idea

Create an App that lets Dog Owners find and book a Dog Sitter or Dog Walker easy and on short notice.

Side Note: This is a fictional project to showcase my UX/UI Design skills.

Challenge

Create an intuitive, fast and easy to use search and booking process, especially for new users. That meets the need of finding a Dog Sitter/Dog Walker in advance or on short notice.

Business Goals

The business model is a fee included in the booking rate. The fee gets paid by the Dog Owner upon completing the booking. The main business goals are:

  • Conversion: the user completes a booking process

  • Repeated Booking: user books at least 2 times within a month

User Research Learnings

My learnings from User Interviews are that the decision criteria for Dog Sitter/Dog Walkers are: availability, experience, reliability, (personal) recommendations and price. Most important during the stay/walk are communication, reliability and transparency.

The situations in which a Dog Sitter/Dog Walker is needed can be short notice or planned. Private Sitters are in general preferred over “Hotels”.

User Stories

Structure and User Flows

The primary destinations are Search/Finder, Bookings, Profiles and Reviews. Secondary destinations are Messages, Writing a Review, Settings, Help, Contact, Legal, Privacy Policy and Log Out.

Main Screen: Finder

Tradeoffs and Learnings

Main Screen: Booking

Tradeoffs and Learnings

A smartphone screen displaying a booking request for dog walking services, showing the price details and payment options.

Main Screen: Profile

Tradeoffs and Learnings

Color Palette

DogBuddy’s brand is friendly, casual, inviting, clean and modern, emphasized by an intense, fresh and playful primary green.

Apart from illustrations, I am using a monohue palette with different variations of the primary green combined with a grayscale.

Color palette with five swatches labeled from left to right: app background in white (#FDFDFD), light variation in pale mint green (#DBFAED), primary UI color in teal (#4BE4A4), text link color in bright teal (#40C18B), and darker variation in dark teal (#174E37).

Typography

I chose Karla as the font for DogBuddy. With its quirky details that especially show in the letters like “a”, “g”, and “y”, it feels friendly while maintaining high legibility.

Comparison chart showing different text styles with columns for name, font, weight, size, body text style, secondary text style, and label style.

Iconography

To match the fonts character I am using the Feather Icon Set, e.g. bottom navigation:

Screenshot of a mobile app navigation menu with icons and labels for Finder, Messages, Bookings, Reviews, and Profile.

Imagery

I created illustrations to convey the friendly and modern vibe of DogBuddy.
Among others, they are displayed during the Onboarding process to showcase the different functionalities of the App.

The Onboarding focuses on learnings from User Research and introduces nouns such as “Finder” and “DogBuddy” to the user.

Final Prototype

I developed a clickable prototype with my final design in Figma. It includes my learnings from validating critical user flows by Usability Testing and all screens from the Flow Chart like messages or creating reviews.

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If you're looking for a UX/UI designer who brings structure to complex problems, I’d love to hear about your project.

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