Project Overview
Having used Rover for dog-sitting throughout my university years, I grew increasingly frustrated with its user experience over the years. The app seemed prioritise the user experience of dog owners over sitters, creating an opportunity for an app-redesign project.
problem
The Rover app from a sitter’s perspective lacked intuitiveness and seamless functionality with sitter-related features often buried within menus. To illustrate this, I conducted a user flow analysis to emphasise its clunky navigation structure.
- Unintuitive navigation structure
- Inability to directly modify sitter features within the app; prompted browser launch for modifications
- Lack of centralised dashboard/overview screen
Goal
While I primarily concentrated on enhancing the sitter user experience, the restructuring aimed for dual functionality, serving both sitters and dog owners effectively.
- Re-organise data on multiple bookings
- Improve access to information on individual dogs and owners
- Enhancing glanceability of important information
Existing interaction flow
restructuring information architecture
A pain point I encountered with the app was the redirection to the Rover mobile site when attempting to modify sitter services, followed by a prompt to install the app within the mobile browser page.
A majority of essential sitter features were concealed within a single menu and lacked native app functionality, which undermined the core utility of the application.
Proposed restructured interaction flow
On launch, the Rover app displays the Inbox screen, which was very rarely my desired interaction when opening the app. From my personal experience as a Rover sitter, my primary interactions with the Rover app revolved around:
- Viewing my upcoming schedule
- Accessing information about upcoming guests
- Checking payment status
Therefore I had chose to develop a dashboard that prioritised these key features, and a calendar view that allows users to view their upcoming schedules with information on guests.
Low-fidelity wireframes of dashboard and calendar screens
Prototyping & USABILITY TESTING
Early usability testing was done with low-fidelity wireframes and paper prototypes. Presenting all screens simultaneously encouraged discussions about their relationships and the rationale behind the new structure. I was also able to directly annotate each screen when ironing out user flows, and facilitated quick adjustments to the information architecture.
Low-fi wireframes of primary flow
Paper prototype testing
UI & Visual design
In tandem, I explored modernising the UI design through the new screen concepts while preserving Rover’s existing visual identity. This also streamlined the original app, reducing the number of screens and optimising the user flow according to a sitter’s requirements.
Calendar screen explorations
Final colour scheme
final designs
I continued to create high-fidelity wireframes of the remaining screens that are integral to Rover's dog sitter experience, aiming to highlight information that is important to the user and allow for easier discoverability of sitter features.
next steps
- Further user testing – initial usability tests were conducted with a convenience sample, so further testing and research should be done with Rover sitters to validate their pain points and my proposed design solutions
- Address accessibility concerns – the existing colour palette raises some difficulty with remaining WCAG compliant, therefore further work must be done to maintain accessibility standards
