In addition to owning two German Shepherds of our own, my wife and I work with Shenandoah Shepherd Rescue to transport, foster and find homes for neglected, abused or downright abandoned dogs coming from Texas (primarily the Rio Grande Valley area). To date, we've had the privilege of fostering half a dozen dogs. Being a designer, I naturally began identifying patterns and frustrations throughout the experience, and brainstorming opportunities for improvement. The dog rescue process, at least with the organization we work with, contains a range of pain points that makes an already emotional experience unnecessarily stressful for participants. The majority of participants are volunteers with a deep-rooted passion for animal welfare and rescue, and are performing the equivalent of a full-time job on top of already being full-time parents and/or professionals. Unfortunately, communications between staff, volunteers and applicants are scattered across a wide range of media (text, phone, email, Facebook, and the current portal, hosted on RescueGroups.org). Given that staff availability is in constant flux, dog statuses change on a regular basis (including variables like location, age, observed behaviors, required vaccinations, illnesses, medical procedures, etc), and new dogs and applicants are constantly being added to the queue, a lot of information is either not effectively communicated or worse, ends up getting ‘lost in transit’.

With a loose value prop and high-level data model in place, I needed more concrete archetypes to design for. The app would revolve around three key characters – volunteers, dogs and applicants. Obviously, not all the characters roll up neatly up into user archetypes; from an info hierarchy standpoint, the volunteers would be the primary users, applicants would be secondary users, and each dog would be a 'project' undergoing a multi-step journey from identification to forever home.

Having been a boots-on-the-ground participant in volunteer efforts, I had a ton of observed and recorded data available to me, allowing me to take a very lean approach to my initial research. The data came in the form of messages and notes from volunteers, observations of volunteer behavior in a variety of contexts (adoption events, transport meetups, digital spaces), conversations with potential adopters, adopter bios, and notes from caseworkers. In addition, my wife and I happened to fit both buckets – we had experience as both fosters and adopters, having foster-failed our second German Shepherd, Apollo. It's always nice to design a solution that I myself would use and benefit from.

I synthesized my research into a few archetypes, ranking them by some of the aforementioned Indices, identifying JTBD, and considering how each archetype would be handled by PoochPortal's algorithms.

Once I had a good sense of who I was designing for, I jumped right into the pixels. The general vision for the app had been forming in my head, and I already knew the main features I'd need – a high-level dashboard, a hub for volunteers and applicants, and most importantly, an area to manage our canine citizens.

The dashboard feature would display and compare metrics for rescue efforts on a weekly, monthly and annual basis, leveraging data viz elements like counters, trend and pie charts, and a rescue map to show dog journeys from Texas to their destination (largely in the DC, Maryland and Virginia area). The dashboard would also allow CSV export for further reporting outside the app.

In addition to the dashboard, the volunteers hub would allow users to browse volunteers by role, status, location and group. Volunteer availability is constantly in flux, so a central place to quickly manage and allocate staffing was a key part of the experience, especially for coordinators. Specific features include a fuzzy search, the ability to add new users as volunteers, and quick filters to narrow down the list to by role, group (driver, foster, interviewer or caseworker) and availability. A potential delighter was the ‘featured volunteer’ in the upper-left of the page header: an opportunity to showcase a random volunteer every 24 hours, and link users directly to their profile/bio.