Buddy Mobile App Concept
OVERVIEWHealthy Paws is the #1 customer-rated pet insurance since 2016. They were the first pet insurance company to have an app and do away with requiring a claim form. In that same effort, they wanted to expand their tech side with the creation of a utilitarian app that make managing your pet’s information easily and effortlessly.
ROLELead UX/UI Designer
User Research, Wireframes, Interaction, Visual Design, Prototyping & Testing
Background
Buddy was conceptualized to help liberate your time so you could enjoy the things you love. Buddy was to act as your personal virtual pet assistant. The chatbot would be a utilitarian app that was capable of helping you set reminders, fetch vaccination information, create care notes, submit a claim to your pet insurance company and so much more.
Challenge
We wanted Buddy to go beyond the decision tree and be able to comprehend context-aware requests. Our thought was that Buddy would seamlessly be integrated into the utilitarian app concept and would improve the user’s life when it comes to maintaining their pet’s information.
High-fidelity Wireframes
We also had the challenge of how we were going to approach a feature-rich app with the least amount of visual disturbance.
After defining the information hierarchy, it was now time to lay it all out on paper — so to speak. We chose to design Buddy via a card-based layout. By using cards, we gained the advantages of adaptive design, scan-ability and communicating chunks of information in a digestible way.
Conversational Design
The first step taken was to outline all the possible actions that could be activated by user and note anything that was bot prompted. Our main focus with all the actions and features was that we didn’t want to impede on the main functionality of the app itself—managing your pet’s information. The list was then re-visited and narrowed it down to what best suited the app.
We then needed to consider the tonality of Buddy and how formal (or not) the bot was going to be. These were all taken into consideration as we started curating the scripts for all the possible interactions Buddy would be involved in.
Solution
This project took a slight change in course and was converted to a design only project. It was decided that a solely utilitarian app wasn’t the route that Healthy Paws wanted to go. We moved forward with a new project that piggybacked off the research and learnings that came from Buddy to help with the future of a new app: Scritch.
Omni-Present Buddy
Buddy is an omni-present feature that users can call upon at any time to assist with a plethora of tasks.
Reminders
Need a reminder to pick up cat food? No problem. Users can keep all their pet’s reminders and events in one place.
Pet Insurance
Buddy can interact with Healthy Paws’ original app to seamlessly submit claims from either app and can track down your pet’s medical vaccines on behalf of the user.
If not covered, the app communicates the importance of pet insurance and helps provide educational information.
Care Instructions
Store your care instructions, edit when necessary and share them with care givers, veterinarians, friends and family with a press of a button!