Overview

If you have owned a pet or currently own one, you know how exhausting and challenging the 1st time pet ownership experience is. The notoriety on puppy walks is not like the Instagram or Pinterest posts we are tagged in. The sleepless “house breaking” nights are brutal. The 1st night with doggy-diarrhea makes you question every decision you have made. The 1st time in a dog park, as exciting as it seems, is packed with anxiety and lastly the true dollar-amount spent toward the pet products from food to insurance is even more shocking.

We know nothing about these challenges when we buy (or hopefully adopt) our 1st furry friend. There isn’t a blueprint or an induction roadmap that teaches us what to do or what is about to hit us. All brands from food and nutrition, to training and health, to even pet socializing apps (dogs in specific) ‘assume’ and ‘expect’ us to be pretty much seasoned and all-around veterans with our new friends. We are expected to know how much to feed our overly-praised-with-treats obese dog based on a chart printed on the packaging or expect the separation anxiety to magically go away with a treat-shooting-robot circling the couch; which by the way, its cushions are ripped into pieces due to low-mental activity of the same furry friend. 

Strategy

We wanted this 1st-time experience to be different for all 1st time pet parents. We wanted it to be packed with excitement. We wanted it to be a breeze in the dog park (you see what I did there) and like any other 1st experience, as it might have some learnings and fears but it will make us empowered and knowledgable to take it as it comes and make us better pet-parents. For us, our pets and our neighbors.

Opportunity

In 2019 Mars Petcare launched Kinship as an arm to find new ways to realize the promise of transformational technologies in order to create a brighter future for pets around the world. Their capabilities include a $100M venture fund, a pet care startup accelerator, industry-leading technology, growing data and analytics and consumer brands like Whistle and Wisdom Health to bring pets and their owners closer together. 

The untapped market of “1st time pet parents” is a great opportunity for market penetration and optimal substantial growth and cross sell for Kinship.

Design Process

Like any solution-based approach, a project needed to be broken down into manageable chunks. Depending on the team, size, time and efforts needed I pick and choose between Design Thinking, Agile Design Process and Product Thinking.

Thinking in Products, not features

In order to differentiate the experience from the competition, we thought in ‘products’ to make sure that we build the right features for the right audience and finally tackle the real problems that the customers are actually facing or currently have vs. building ‘better functionalities’ than our competition.

Since getting our product fast to the market is a priority, we picked Jordi Romero’s MVP and Nikkel Blaase’s product thinking as the ‘product strategy’ framework.

Research Outline

UX research methods are great at producing data and insights. At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep product-development efforts on the right track, in agreement with true user needs and not imaginary ones. Now obviously this is not always the case. Time, budget, and so many things get in the middle…

The earlier the research, the more impact the findings will have on the product.

Also, each project is different, so the stages are not always neatly compartmentalized. The important thing is not to execute a giant list of activities in rigid order. Here is what we do for each stage.

As a designer, I (and I always encourage my team too) always keep these questions ‘top of mind’. When we receive the product/project requirement doc we make sure that these questions are answered. Even throughout the project, I ask them again and again as they make sure we are on the right track.

1. What are the top business priorities for this?

2. Why is the problem worth solving? What is the customer and business impact?

3. What is the problem? What data or research support our assumptions?

4. Who has the problem, and have we validated the problem exists?

Discover

SWOT

Strengths

• Kinship brand affinity

• Financial backing

• One stop solution vs. blog posts

• Fertile market

• Untapped niche

• Increasing ‘pet parents’

• Pet parents becoming ‘pet families’

Weaknesses

• New brand presence - High marketing $

• Lack of loyal customers

• Hard to solve for ‘retention’

Opportunities

• Powered by pet science and data

• Personalized experience with real impact on supporting pet parents

• Benefit of being part of Kinship ecosystem

• High potential of partnership with other brands

• Becoming a p

• latform for sponsorships (content and product)

Threats

• Low to zero switching costs between platforms

• Other brands copying and building on 

• Personalized ‘Box Subscriptions’ catching on  

• Loyalty to other brands

Competitive Analysis

Market Trends

The fastest-growing pet businesses are taking advantage of these trends:

Food: Consumers don’t want traditional pet foods. They want healthy ingredients and they want to understand the ingredients list. They are opting for more fresh, frozen and made-to-order diets for their pets. These products cost more and consumers are trading up.

Online private brands: Amazon and Chewy.com are promoting their own brands to disrupt the market and eliminate middleman margins. Other smaller, niche players are likewise creating brands with their own identity.

Treats: Pet parents feed their pets 8-10 treats a day and the trends in which treats are succeeding are following the same trends as pet food.

Technology: We are seeing pet services and conveniences developing along the lines of services for people. Just as with people, the smartphone has enabled this change.

Increased services: There is more attention being paid to pet grooming, pet care, pet transportation, pet hotels and many others.

End of Life: There are a great deal more products and services for pets as they age and pass away. Palliative services for terminally ill pets, pet cemeteries and cremation, grief consulting are some examples.

Availability: Mass merchants, grocery and even dollar stores are adding premium pet foods and other products so that it’s available at many more points of distribution than ever before.

DTC: The direct-to-consumer trend has reached the pet industry in a big way. Many brands are following their human product counterparts and selling products without going through a traditional multi-brand retailer.

Priority Goals

It is critical to deliver mobile experiences that are fast and friction-free. In our ‘stakeholder’s meeting,’ we need to identify key priorities that can help us race ahead of the competition and meet user’s needs. These priorities should be something every stakeholder and their department agree on, keep holy and use them as guiding principles.

Below were some priorities/goals that I thought we could apply to this:

Be customer-first, not technology-first

When it comes to what people want, our research tells us they are demanding three things from brands: “help me faster,” “know me better,” and “wow me everywhere.” Brands who invest in these areas and create memorable experiences will win users’ hearts, minds, and ultimately, dollars.

Make every moment, interaction, experience, a brand builder

As the frequency and duration of time people spend on their phones rises, so do their expectations for personalized experiences. These moments are an opportunity for brands to leave a lasting impression. Users interact with brands on mobile twice as much as they do anywhere else. That includes TV, in-store, virtual assistants and so on. Every time someone has an awesome experience with a brand, it raises the bar for what they expect from everyone else.

Build for the Customer Journey

As technology changes, so do consumer expectations. Customers today are impatient and their standards are unforgiving. Consumers expect brands to intuitively know what they need, when they need it, and deliver it instantly. Tackling these challenges should be the way the business operates. Friction burns customers. 

Relentless forward progress - Continuity

The major challenge all brands should be embracing is continuing to deliver on mobile while also translating that seamless experience to the new technologies consumers are flocking to. Things like Voice and AI are only going to make customers even more demanding. The road should be: A customer-centric approach that gives people a seamless experience on whichever platform they choose.

Optimizing for Customer Lifetime Value - CLV

One of our biggest challenges is to determine who cares about our brand enough to keep coming back. But even more important is finding users who are going to drive profitability. Machine Learning makes it easier to find and engage the customers that are most valuable to us by figuring out the most effective ways to engage them. Rather than narrowly defining a target segment as “35-54 year-old woman,” ML could help us take into account our business outcome—a sale, an in-app purchase, a completed level in a game, etc. It then looks at millions of signals to find users at scale who are likely to complete those actions.

OKRs

A strategy (mobile or not) needs to be tied down to clear business objectives.

These objectives should be measured by Key Results. OKRs are how you track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement around measurable goals that should help grow the business by establishing a connection with every interested user and eventually make the business profitable.

With the help of PMs and the client there were a few business objectives that could make sense for this strategy:

1. Double customer acquisition by Q4

2. Convert 30% Free Members into subscribers by Q4

3. Collect better data in order to provide users with better personalization

4. Express the value propositions in a clear delightful experience - One Brand

HEART Framework

To apply user-centered metrics I usually use Google’s HEART Framework to evaluate the quality of the user experience, and help teams measure the impact of UX changes vs. the goals we have set and the signals we are receiving.

This could be done in parallel or instead of System Usability Scale (SUS) or any other metrics.

Explore

important to remember: 1st hand insight

Mobile users are much different than other platform users. They want to get tasks done as quickly as possible. They have a ‘context’ (location, time, etc.) to all their needs. When users take out their phones, they’re often in between tasks or on the go.

1. Mobile users are highly task-oriented

2. Mobile users are easily disengaged

User Persona

User Empathy Map

User Journey Map

From the research, we began to produce artifacts to help synthesize our findings. We build journey maps for ‘1st-time pet owner’  to understand the problems and identify the opportunities better. This could be done through guerrilla research, from which patterns begin to emerge. 

In order to get a better sense of the user’s world (primary and secondary - maybe Betty’s roommate or partner) we should create journey maps for every particular journey/experience that Betty encounters as a 1st-time parent. From food purchase to training, and so on. Here is a list of some of these key journeys:

• In-store food and treats purchase

• Online food and treats purchase

• Subscription Box purchase (if applicable)

• Training sessions

• Dog Park visits

• When a question arises

• Finding a vet

• Finding a medical insurance provider

The more journey maps, the more we will understand Betty’s world and hence understand her pains and spot opportunities that could eventually lead into features.

Here is an example for in-store food and treats purchases.

Product Definition

When thinking in products, as designers we should be able to answer the following questions first:

• What problem do we solve? (User problem) 

• For whom are we doing this? (Target audience) 

• Why are we doing this? (Vision) 

• How are we doing this? (Strategy) 

• and what do we want to achieve? (Goals)

• Only then it makes sense to think about what exactly we are doing (Features).

Product Definition Filled

User Stories

Product Features

These were some of the possible features for the mobile app

Designing for moments

Before we get into wires, flows, interaction design and so on let’s remember again that mobile users are much different than other platform users. They want to get tasks done as quickly as possible. They have a ‘context’ (location, time, etc.) to all their needs. When users take out their phones, they’re often in between tasks or on the go. Hence, we should be designing for these ‘micro-moments’.

• I want to do moments

• I want to know moments

• I want to go moments

• I want to buy moments

Understanding their goals and desires will only help us better meet their needs and design for them

Wires

Final Design

Betty can see her progress on each task or area she wants to improve. She has a dashboard that represents every category of ‘pet parenthood’ - health, nutrition, activities, trainings, etc.

She can navigate through each goal and see details. Betty goes through a guided ‘step by step’ experience to overcome all her pet parenthood challenges.