Whiteboard Exercise_2: Cat Fostering

How could cat owners easily find people to temporarily foster their cats when they are out of town?

Prompt: Design a product that helps cat owners easily find people to temporarily take care of their cats.

Interviewer: Qi

Interviewee: Jessie

Step 1. Understand the problem

To better understand the prompt, I asked the following questions to the interviewer:

• Q: What are the current problems for cat owners to find fostering families? A: If I’m going to be away for a few days, I need to send my cat to my friends’ places. However, my friends might not always be available. Otherwise, I have to send my cat to a pet hotel which is very pricy and not trustworthy.
• Q: What are the goals of this product? A: I want to have a place for cat owners to easily find trustworthy caretakers.

Step 2: Understand the user & context

Then I tried to understand the target users and their context.

• Q: What kind of users? A: Anyone who have to send his/her cats to someone else, and anyone who loves cats and wants to take care of cats.
• Q: Can I assume that the fostering is temporary, and the owner to take the cat once he/she backs to the area? A: Yes.
• Q: Is it free or paid? A: I would think that people would want to voluntarily do this, so it should be free.

Based on the information I acquired so far, I concluded two user types: cat owner and caretakers. Their goals and usage context are:

Cat owner: I need to send his/her cats to foster families for a few days, the time range varies but the fostering is temporary. The fostering family should be trustworthy and reliable. I also want to stay in contact with the fostering family frequently to check my cat’s status.

Cat Owner Needs: search/find caretaker, review caretaker, book caretaker, and send cat(s), contact caretaker regarding cat’s status.

Caretaker: I’m a cat lover! I love to play and take care of cats. I may or may not have cats myself. I’d like to help other people taking care of their cats. I’m reliable and have plenty of experience taking care of cats.

Caretaker Needs: list info, bio, availability, fostering history, reviews, and communicate with cat owners.

Step 3: Let’s walk through a user story

Time to make assumptions. Now I have a basic understanding of the problem, goal, user, and context. What is a user story like?

• Q: There are two types of users: cat owner and caretaker, and I think they will have different portals since they have different goals. Can I start by constructing the story and flow of a cat owner? A: Sure.
• Q: Considering the use cases, I think this product should be both website and mobile. Since people might want to sit in front of a computer to find and chat with caretakers, or might want to check their cats’ status with caretakers on the go. A: I agree. For the MVP, maybe we could go with a responsive web version.
• Q: For this story walkthrough, let’s first focus on the cat owner’s use case of finding a trustworthy caretaker from the platform, and make a fostering agreement. Let’s also narrow down the device to a desktop web. What do you think? A: Sure, go ahead.

After narrowing down the use case and usage behavior, I started to write down the key steps for the story.

1. Onboarding (owner profile + cat profile)
2. Browse for available caretakers in the area (filter)
3. Choose one to view more details
4. Pick the date
5. Start a conversation
6. Mutual agreement
7. Get caretaker contact info and address. Schedule a sending time.
8. Done!

Some features (solutions) I came up with after writing the stories are location/area enabling, caretaker recommendations, reviews, calendar availability, online chat, mutual agreement interaction, address revealing, calendar blocking…

Step 4: Sketch out the main screens

After coming up with a high-level story, steps, and solutions. I’m ready to start sketching out some screens.

• Q: Since onboarding is needed for new users, do you want me to draw onboarding screens as well? A: Let’s assume that the user has already finished the onboarding and created profiles for both the owner and the cat.

So I started with the home screen. On the home screen, the user should be able to browse caretakers in his/her area. We should also recommend some top caretakers for the user. A search and filter system is necessary for the user to quickly find a caretaker. For the filter, users should be able to set start and end days, rating preferences, if owning a cat before is preferred…

Let’s assume that the user finds a caretaker and clicked his/her profile to view more details. On this page, the user should see the name, intro, reviews, rating of this caretaker. If this caretaker has cat(s), the user could see their cat(s)’ bio as well. We could use tags/chips to describe a cat’s characteristics. Most importantly, the user should see a calendar indicating the availability of this caretaker.

Software: Miro

If the user thinks this caretaker is a good fit, they could choose a time range and contact the caretaker. The chat system is built inside the platform as a popout drawer.

Through the chat, the user could have a conversation with the caretaker to see if they are a good fit. Whenever the user sends out a message the caretaker will be notified so they could jump to the platform to reply. We should also design email communications as well. The user could contact with multiple caretakers at the same time to find the best one.

If both the user and the caretaker like each other, they could start an agreement. Either party could initialize the agreement action. For the user side, there is a button of “I’d like to send my cat to this caretaker” (or similar shorter message) at the bottom of the chatbox. A similar button is available for the caretaker side as well. Upon clicking the button, the system will pop out a message with an agreement to both parties for “1-click sign”. After mutual agreement, the caretaker could choose to reveal his/her contact info and address info, and both parties could work on finalizing the sending/pickup date and time through the chat.

Step 5: Summarization and evaluation

Yay, I’ve mapped out the basic flows of one use case and sketched the basic screens. I need to summarize evaluate the design right now.

Interviewer: How to make sure the user privacy is protected?

For both owner and caretaker, they need to input contact and location info during onboarding. But we will not reveal that information until mutual agreement. Be default, a caretaker’s profile will just show basic bio and fostering history.

Interviewer: How do you evaluate the effectiveness and success of this design?

In general, I’m going to measure the number of new signups and active users (retention rate). I will also measure the mutual agreement success rate (total conversations vs. total agreement). For the search and filter, I’m also going to evaluate search accuracy.

Interviewer: If you found that the caretaker booking rate is very low, how would you improve it?

I will first understand why it is low and find out which interaction or flow lead to this low. I will partner with researchers and PMs to create a validation plan. Some assumptions I have might be poor recommendation/matching of caretakers, poor communication and agreement experience, or cat owners don’t get expected information from the website.

Interviewer: Is there anything that you would do differently?

I didn’t consider the case of this owner has more than one cats. If an owner has multiple cats, he might need to check: 1) if one caretaker is willing to take more cats; 2) if the owner wants to send the cat to more than one caretaker. If I have more time, I will address this use case as well.