Chomp!

Role: Research, Visuals, Interactions
Tools: Figma, Miro, Pen + Paper

This project is a work in progress and process work will be added in installments

We wish our pets could live forever…

What if we could know if they were living their healthiest life?

Overview

Chomp! started as a nutrition tracking app for our pets. This concept project stemmed from how often I heard friends talk about wanting their pet to live forever or that they were concerned about how to make sure they were taking the best care of their pet. It got me thinking about what do we do as humans to keep the clock ticking — we try to eat well, move more, and keep track of our health so we can both stay on track and see if something changes. Why wouldn’t we do the same for our pets?

Goals

My goal with this project is to explore the intersection of health apps and pet industry to see if a pet health tracking app would be a benefit to consumers. In the exploration, I aim to come up with a creative solution for a tedious but meaningful workflow.

Context + Constraints

For the purposes of the project I added the constraint of this mobile app being aimed at a specific pet food brand which would lend itself to future feature expansion (e.g. food subscription plans, toy + treat subscriptions, brand pet community, etc). This narrows the database of food and nutrition data but could be generalized with a larger database of pet food brands.

Additional Use Cases

Outside of personal use this framework could have greater implications for pet shelters, boarding homes, or business that has multiple animals with multiple people in charge of taking care of them.

Screens

Initial rendering of initial onboarding, password reset, home screen (with and without data), and profiles.

Chomp! Returning User with Forgot Password

Process

I followed the Design Thinking methodology and will be using it to structure the case study.

Empathize

User Interviews

In order to build realistic user stories, I surveyed 10 people, aged between 25 to 62, who have at least 1 pet and have been established pet owners. The questions focused on their lifestyle, feelings around habit tracking, and pet health.

Main takeaways:

Couples were not always on the same page about their pet’s eating habits and one person took on the primary role
Pets were typically fed around the same time every day with little to no variation in food per meal
Treats were mostly used as a tool and less so an indulgence
People were more motivated to track habits for the benefit of others instead of themselves

Personas

From the interviews it became clear that there were three user groups who would benefit from a pet health tracker app.

People who have a sick pet and need to track their food intake, medication, and energy
People who are training their pet and want to make sure they aren’t overfeeding their pet in training
People who want to make sure their pet is getting the right amount of food for their age/activity level and like to stay have a record of their pets health

Problem Statements

After working through the problem statements for the three user groups I recognized that the scope was growing quite large to include a number of features per use case. From here I took the approach of listing out the features to see where there was overlap and where features were singular use case specific. This prompted me to think about how features or information could be derived from other information.

Primary: Joan

Joan is a very focused and driven professional who needs to keep track of daily habits over her loved ones, including her pets because she cares a lot and needs to be able to know all the different variables for when the norm changes

Secondary: Mattie

Mattie is a stressed out and busy consultant who needs a way to make sure his cat is getting enough food and her medications everyday because his cat has a medical condition and could easily get sick if she isn’t taken care of.

Tertiary: Lauren

As a busy young professional who needs a way to make sure she isn’t giving her foster puppy too many treats while training because she doesn’t want to overfeed them and make them sick

Check back soon for the next installment of Chomp!