Overview

SOPet is a mobile platform for pet owners to share experiences and get expert advice. This redesign transforms it into an all-in-one pet care solution with community features, veterinary services, AI diagnosis, and social Q&A. We created a more intuitive experience for pet owners through comprehensive UX research including:

• Heuristic evaluation audit

• Competitor analysis

• User research

• Survey

• Usability testing

Objective

• Validate both existing and new features based on user feedback and insights, ensuring they effectively address real user needs in key use cases.

• Increase Daily Active Users (DAU) by understanding behaviors and needs of SOPet’s existing Line OpenChat group members and tailoring the app experience to better serve them.

• Drive adoption from new users beyond the existing Line OpenChat community by improving onboarding and addressing unmet pet care needs in the broader market.

Problem Statement

Users avoid to use SOPet's app because its features duplicate their existing Line OpenChat group without offering better functionality or user experience.Work Process

1.Measure Existed Design

While recruit user for the interview. We decide to measure SOPet application's usability by expert review to identify potential usability problems.

The methodologies has chosen to complete our objective:

Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic evaluation has chosen to measure usability with most effective and quickest method to conducted in early stage. The area of examine interface is group by flow including:

• Enter as guest

• Sign up

• Log in

• Create post

• Comment and engage with post.

• Search

• Notification

• Profile

The result

After conducted heuristic evaluation. Our team found some critical issue usability problem the most issue found including

1. Visibility of System status: 9
   Most are found in Profile edit flow

2. User control and freedom: 6
   Most are found in Create post flow

3. Consistency and standards: 6
   Most are found in Profile edit flow

2.Research

SOPet faces critical usability issues identified through stakeholder guerrilla testing. Key problems include inadequate features that fail to retain Line OpenChat users and outdated design that reduces user interest. Our team prioritized exploring new features to enhance user engagement and meet user needs.

To address these challenges, I employed four targeted research methodologies with specific objectives:

Competitor analysis

Our team began by conducting competitor analysis to analyze and benchmark features offered by other pet-related mobile applications in the market. This helped us uncover gaps, and explore opportunities for differentiation in our own product.

We selected six mobile applications based on their popularity, relevance, and similarity in features. For each app, we analyzed key aspects including core functionalities, onboarding flows, community features, medical support systems, and general UI patterns.
Due to the niche nature of the pet care platform we’re designing, finding direct competitors was challenging, so we also included indirect competitors to gain broader insights and inspiration from adjacent markets.

Competitive analysis result

Key finding

Based on our research, we found that pet-focused community applications are part of a niche market. As a result, we expanded our analysis to include indirect competitors including social media community platform in order to uncover opportunities and better align our product with user needs within this specialized space.

• Common strengths: Most social media platforms—both direct and indirect competitors—offer robust features for posting text and media, along with interactive functions such as reactions, comments, and sharing also most of them allow user to create their own community or group inside the app to share or talk in specific topic.

• Pain points: One downside of having overly robust features is a cluttered and overwhelming UI, which can lead to cognitive overload. As a result, users may struggle to navigate the interface or fail to fully engage with all the available features.

• Opportunities: Our analysis identified an opportunity to differentiate SOPet by leveraging our partnership with veterinarians of Mahidol University to serve user needed.

User interview

Our team conducted user interviews based on persona profiles provided by the stakeholder team. These personas were defined through their prior research before our team joined the project. To recruit suitable participants, we launched an online survey to screen respondents and ensure they aligned with the defined user personas. With limited time of this project we decide to launch survey inside SOPet's Line Openchat to ensure that most of respondents are most match with our user persona. We decide to interview only 5 participant based on limited timeline of this project.

The number of survey respondents from SOPet's Line OpenChat who matched the user persona and agreed to be interviewed was lower than expected, so we decided to recruit the remaining participants through our personal social media networks.

Interview process

Research goal

To understand the behavior of pet owners both inside and outside SOPet's Line Openchat group in terms of searching for information, consulting about pet illnesses, and performing basic care, as well as their decision-making when choosing pet-related applications.

Research question

• Understand user behavior about how they search or get information about their pet symptom

• Understand user behavior about which pet health care service often use.

Interview session

Affinity map

Key finding

🐶 Users who joined SOPet's Line Openchat:

• Mostly those with experience in treating sick pets at clinics or hospitals and want a backup for emergency situations.

• Often use SOPet in parallel with LINE OpenChat (especially for 24/7 inquiries).

• Own 3 or more pets and actively engage in communities.

• Have multiple social media accounts to connect with others in pet communities.

• Interested in a variety of pet topics — health, food, behavioral issues, or even rare (exotic) pets.

• May not fully understand how to care for pets but actively seek help through various platforms.

🙅‍♂️ Users who don’t joined SOPet's Line Openchat:

• Prefer searching for pet health information on Google or social media, rather than through a community-based app.

• Don’t feel the need for an app like SOPet if their current solutions already suffice.

• Own only 1–2 pets and aren’t deeply involved in community engagement.

• Limited digital access or mainly use the internet for entertainment, not information-seeking.

• Tend to post about pets on personal social media rather than in pet-focused communities.

• Many use basic apps like Notes on iPhone to store pet info, not apps specifically designed for pet care.

Survey

As a result from the user interview, our team aimed to validate these insights by identifying user attitude patterns through quantitative data. Therefore, we decided to launch a follow-up survey based on the questions and answers from the interviews. We adjust the scope of running survey within 2 week to fit our timeline by expect to receive respond for 100. We publish survey via Google form sent to all pet facebook group and relevant.

The result

After gathering respondent we visualize data by using Looker studio to provide efficiency visualization to stakeholder. Based on the survey results, users tend to show interest in pet applications that offer social media feeds and pet care services, as reflected by high Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores. However, in contrast, most users still prefer to Google their pet's symptoms rather than post on social media platforms or online communities when their pets are sick. This indicates a conflict between user attitudes and actual behavior.

3. Ideate

After gathering the results and conducting brainstorming sessions with the team and stakeholders to evaluate the most feasible options, we finalized our solution by adding more feed categories such as cute photo category and review category, implementing a point system to encourage user engagement, and introducing veterinary services such as teleconsultation and an AI-powered veterinarian chat bot. Also keep original SOPet's feature including Q&A post like Quora app.

4.Design & Prototype

Our UI designer implement the solution that we define in the new design and create a prototype to prepare for usability test session.

5.Usability test

After gathering research insights and designing a new mobile UI that incorporates our proposed solutions, we conducted a usability test with the same participants from the user interview sessions. The objective was to collect feedback on the new design and gain deeper insights into the gap between user attitudes and actual behavior identified during the research phase. The 8 task we give user to test including:

1. Onboarding task

2. Enter to guest mode task

3. Searching task

4. Chat with AI task

5. Create post task

6. Create Q&A task

7. Find a related post task

8. Change user information on user profile task

Key finding

The average SEQ (Single Ease Question) score across all tested tasks was 3.6, indicating that the usability of the new UI design is generally good. After the usability test, we conducted a short follow-up interview to gather feedback on the features and functions included in the design. Participants shared that, in practice, they preferred using pet care services over asking questions in the community section.

Next step

After gathering feedback from the usability test, we decided to improve the design by making the pet care service page the main page instead of the social feed. This decision was made through a brainstorming session with stakeholders, focusing on aligning the app’s structure with actual user behavior and priorities.