Goodfriend
Connecting pet parents with veternarian care to keep their fur babies healthy
GoodFriend is a two-sided marketplace where pet parents can search for nearby pet care providers to request and schedule appointments based on their real-time availability.
ROLE: UI, UX DESIGN, VISUAL DESIGN, DESIGN SYSTEMS
TIMELINE: AUG 2022 (3 WEEKS)
CLIENT AGENCY PROJECT: PET CARE, E-COMMERCE MARKETPLACE
The Problem
The only pet services offered on Goodfriend were grooming and training. Our client looked to expand revenue avenues by adding a new service to their platform: veterinarian care.
But how would this look like for pet parents and vet clinics?
The Strategy
I was tasked with designing a customer facing experience so pet parents could request vet appointments in collaboration with Soyeon, the UX designer in charge of the vet clinic experience.
With the internal design team and Project Manager, Alise, an agile design sprint roadmap was outlined for our client.
Our Goals:
- Design and integrate an MVP vet care experience for the user types: customers (pet parents) and pet care providers (vet clinics)
- Ship designs and deliverables to our internal dev team and then transfer ownership to our client’s dev team as a Figma file by the end of August
Research
With grooming and training services in place, my goal was to create an architecture that’d follow a pet parent's natural understanding and organization of the app's features.
To do so, I audited the sitemap to envision what main webpages (highlighted in green) would be referenced for the pet parent experience: "Booking" and "My Appointments". Next was to understand what the avenues within the customer journey would look like in detail.
However, without an API to integrate vet schedules into the system,
How could we build an appointment system to accommodate the unpredictable lives of vets and their customers?
Auditing the grooming and training booking flows, I noted that because vet service prices and vet schedule availability were unknown, this'd change 3 main steps within the Booking process:
- Select services
- Choose date & time
- Confirm and book
As a result, when ideating with Soyeon, we not only discovered a happy path for pet parents and vet clinics, but also considered edge cases (decline, reschedule, & cancel). We then hashed out minor discrepancies in both experiences with our client followed by any updates.
Ideation & Design
Due to a short timeline, most of the ideation focus was when pet parents would choose 3 dates/time slots (1 preferred & 2 alternatives).
I wanted to clearly document, in visual detail, the complex interactions when customers would request vet appointments across each webpage so I created wireflows.
Before the fun part, designing, I conducted a UI audit and adopted the mental model, Atomic Design, to design the most necessary components to UI patterns and variants for a leaner, easier-to-use infrastructure and improved accessibility for devs which was later reviewed with Anya, the UI/Visual Lead Designer.
Shipping & Testing
In preparation for shipping ownership to our client's dev team, I detailed development notes and handed-off an organized final Figma file to allow our internal dev team to implement without needing to ask for much input from design.
After designs were implemented onto staging, a Design QA was held with our internal dev team to review each interaction to improve product quality and identify any gaps of understanding.
Outcomes & The Solution
I designed a responsive MVP customer experience for requesting vet appointments along with additional components/variants introducing a new service type to expand revenue avenues for our client.
"Our project could not have existed without the Graveflex team. They are true partners, and have deep expertise that contributed strategically to our product while executing at a high level. They delivered a world-class, complex product in a relatively tight timeline. I don't know if I'll ever launch a more sophisticated and beautiful MVP again in my career because of the impossibly high bar they set on this project."
Christopher Gonzalez
Former Director of Product @ GoodFriend / Kinship & Current Head of Finance @ A.Team
Learnings & Takeaways
Goodfriend was my 1st major e-commerce project and as an online marketplace, this allowed me to fully exercise my skills in critical thinking, attention to the detail, and time management to scrutinize the intricacies for an MVP that didn't exist yet in just 3 weeks.
I also sought opportunities to experiment with novel interactions and patterns and explored edge cases which I’d love to revisit and fully build out if I had more time.
By converging work done at the agency to in-house level, I delivered new components to Goodfriend's existing design system which was adopted by their internal design and development team. It's rewarding to know that our client was deeply satisfied with the results.
