Product Design for Local Creatures

Local Creatures App

Local Creatures is an app designed to bridge the gap between local animal shelters and the community. With this app, users can easily make donations, volunteer their time, and purchase merchandise; all while earning rewards points. At the same time, it helps users build an online community where they can nurture social connections and doing good things. On the other hand, the app also helps the local animal shelters to fund donations, to gather volunteers, and to sell merch.

Tools

Figma
Illustrator
After Effects
Photoshop

Challenge

Create a mobile e-commerce app for animal shelters in Toronto to make extra fundings by selling merchandises.

Solution

Instead of solely relying on merchandise sales to gain fundings, I want to elevate the app into a more satisfactory experience for the users. Local Creatures provides meaningful activities for animal lovers to volunteer, go to events, donate, purchase shelter merchandise, as well as socialize with other local users and friends; while using a reward system, Good Deeds, for each time user to participate to maximize the feel-good experience.

Check out Local Creatures Branding here

Low-fidelity Wireframes

The first draft for the main user flow - from Homepage to placing merchandise order.

Discover, Define, and Ideate

I conducted these steps before going into the design, usability testing and iterations.

Competitive Audits

I picked 4 key competitors (3 direct and 1 indirect) to determine the market gap and opportunities.

The 4 opportunities I found were to make it a fuss-free ordering process easier, to make the process of selecting product stress-free and more intuitive, to Make more attractive products, and to highlight the sales percentage that actually go to the shelter animals.

Research

Upon the beginning of the project, I wanted to analyze the tangible subproblems in which we could get a better understanding of the research goals.

Research goals

Literature research

From conducting literature research on two of the subject matters; here are some of the insights that I gathered.

Source: The People Who Support Animal Causes: Descriptive Results by faunalytics, Giving To Animals: New Data On Who And How by faunalytics, and Community Is In: How To Create Brand Advocacy Among Gen Z And Millennials by Forbes

Insights generated

Interviews

I held six interviews with whom that fit the profile of the target audience; either current donors or not, to obtain in-depth qualitative responses.

"I think volunteering is a more straightforward way for helping them out. Or at least I would know where my efforts will go to."

- Participant C

"I have not yet made a donation ever. If I have to do it, probably because school asks me to do so; or if there’s a fun activity that peaks my interests "

- Participant A

User Archetypes

Photos by Allison Griffith, Jimmy Dean, and Tamas Pap on Unsplash

User Journey Map

Insights generated

Goal Statement

Local Creatures will let users find meaningful activities and a range of ways to contribute which will affect their sense of belonging and increase self-worth by building stronger connections with an ethical-based community.

Design Principles