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Vet Friendly: Pet Care App

Kari Orth and Sydney Peterson

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Team

Kari Orth

Sydney Peterson

Potential Pet Owner

Pet Owner

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Introduction

Our project centers on the design of an online forum in the form of a pet care app which allows pet-owners and veterinarians to interact and discuss pet needs and care.

“Knowledge management is more than managing knowledge or sources of knowledge; it involves managing the environment where knowledge is exchanged.” (Desouza, pg. 6)

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Approach

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Idea & Design

Interview

Knowledge Graph

Prototype

Our approach included four distinct phases to accomplish our app search interface. With continuous iteration as we developed our understanding of what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go.

Find an idea with potential and develop a plan to implement the idea
Find a subject matter expert to extract tacit knowledge based off our idea
Construct a knowledge graph to better understand the relationships between extracted information
Build a prototype reflecting the needs of our users based on expert opinion and ideas.

Design:

In the early idea phase, we searched UW Veterinary Services resources for ideas. We found a worksheet on their webpage about evaluating pain signs in a variety of animals. As a piece of explicit knowledge, we thought that would be a great way to evaluate the tacit knowledge we gained from our interview. Because we found the pain signs on the UW Vet Services website and as an educational institute, we felt that would be the best place to contact for an interview. Which turned out to be true.

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Idea & Design

UW Veterinary Pain Signs Worksheet

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Interviewee

Senior Clinical Veterinarian
Completed residency training in Department of Comparative Medicine (DCM) in 2014
Leads the resident anesthesia training rotation as well as the DCM anesthesia service
Co-coordinates the resident husbandry rotation which provides training for residents in the topics of laboratory animal husbandry and management of associated equipment, staff and facilities.

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Interview

What is something you wish new pet owners consulted before adopting their pets, regardless of animal? What is the number one mistake most pet owners make?
How do you judge the difference between fear and pain in animals? How do you instruct your students to make the judgment?

We constructed our questions around pain sign detection within animals, but we included broader questions to help avoid cognitive bias in the interview. We wanted to build into the questions the ability to capture information in our blind spots.

The two questions featured here were highly informative. They were broad in scope which allowed our interviewee to explore the topics more thoroughly. They ended up being incredibly useful as they were among the questions that helped redirect our idea of the app and flesh out the functionality and usability. We got the idea of a forum app not just a search interface when interviewee mentioned as a vet he would turn to blogs to learn more about nutrition, which he says is something lacking in the field. I’m sure he can interpret the information found on blogs better than we can but it showed a knowledge management area with potential and scope.

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User Scenario

Name: Catherine
Pet Type: Guinea Pig
Pet Name: Babe
Preferred Vet: North Pointe Animal Hospital
Motivation: New pet owner looking for best care practices
Situation: When she goes to pick Babe up from the cage, they start to shake and exhibit odd behavior, like sticking close to the cage walls. She turns to the app to help uncover why Babe is exhibiting this behavior. She’s not sure if it's her, the new food, cage, or odd brush she bought at the pet store.

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Knowledge Graph

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Prototype

View Figma Prototype

Walk through Catherines scenario

https://www.sog.unc.edu/sites/www.sog.unc.edu/files/course_materials/Cognitive%20Biases%20Codex.pdf

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/guidelines-for-good-visual-information-representations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECI_model_of_knowledge_dimensions

https://www.communityofpractice.ca/background/what-is-a-community-of-practice/

Go to prototype and walk through Catherine’s Scenario

Click Login
Select Forum

Vets are highlighted in Green and given top priority
Ability to search using audio and image/video
Sorted by top comment/question
Included a vet approved icon to provide confidence in the information

Catherine doesn’t see what she’s looking for so she uses the search

Search

“Guinea” spelled wrong; Highlight Recommendation
Highlight Vet Approved Top Priority but also by relevance (as another non related is lower on the list)
Highlight ability to play video/audio and add image

If Catherine still doesn’t see what she’s looking for she can…

Select Filter

Highlight ability to sort by animal
Hover and briefly explain

Behavioral
Financial
Grooming
Health
Nutrition
Recreation (with more study it could be broken down further)

Highlight ability to exclude information

But in this case the second one on the list looks to be the most useful, now it's difficult to add audio or video to figma I checked, but the video that would pop up for her would look something like this…And this would be the post that that helped Catherine (End Catherine Scenario)

Select Guinea Pig link

It is difficult to have to have multiple directions on one object so we created a sample post to give an idea of how pet owners and vets can interact with each other

Create a Post
Go to My Cat wont stop biting me! Help! post (to highlight what a post would look like)

We tried to follow the Tufte model of providing everything the user needs right where they need it, of course first time users will need more help understanding the definition of the icons but once they know it, we designed it to be straightforward and intuitive. (His car example in class builds on the understanding of the inner workings of a car, its gauges, and icons)

Our inclusion of the vet approved symbol is our way to try to combat confirmation bias. By adding an authoritative component to the interface we hope it will reduce the misinformation. It also provides the ability for a preferred vet to see exactly where the pet owner got their information and what conclusion they were making based on it. Hopefully allowing them the ability to weigh in on and correct assumptions on important topics.

We tried to build a diverse community of practice. We felt the integration of multiple animals within the interface would influence knowledge transfer, and spark new search ideas. (Shaking Guinea Pig, may inspire someone to search fear responses in cats, expanding the knowledge of fear responses in cats)

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Interviewee: The cost of pet care and the cost of veterinary care, I think, is not really well understood until you get a pet, and so I wish people knew a little bit more about it.

Interviewee: pet nutrition is a little bit misunderstood you know, what makes a good diet, what kind of things are good for animals cats and dogs to eat specifically and how to evaluate a quality diet kind of thing and there's a lot of myths out there about it.

To bring this together with the SECI model, I’m going to jump between the two to highlight the overall relationship

1. Interview

a. Our interview with interviewee can’t easily be portrayed in a slide but that experience highlighted an exchange of knowledge and ideas

2. Transcript Extraction

a. Allowed us to review and extract knowledge and ideas better than rely on memory

b. We extracted far more influential information, but this portion provided a clear example of the process

3. Implement in Prototype

a. Our prototype was designed to facilitate the merging of ideas and distribution of knowledge among pet owners.

4. Knowledge Transfer

a. The search results aspect provides the ability for people to gain contextual understanding of animal behavior, it allows them to learn by doing. The guinea pig video may inform our new pet owner better technique of pet care. (see what’s happening and why and how to correct behavior)

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Interview

Transcript

Prototype

Search Results

https://www.activepeers.com/the-nonaka-and-takeuchi-knowledge-spiral-model-susan-hayes-culleton/

To bring this together with the SECI model, I’m going to jump between the two to highlight the overall relationship

1. Interview

a. Our interview with Interviewee can’t easily be portrayed in a slide but that experience highlighted an exchange of knowledge and ideas

2. Transcript Extraction

a. Allowed us to review and extract knowledge and ideas better than rely on memory

b. We extracted far more influential information, but this portion provided a clear example of the process

3. Implement in Prototype

a. Our prototype was designed to facilitate the merging of ideas and distribution of knowledge among pet owners.

4. Knowledge Transfer

a. The search results aspect provides the ability for people to gain contextual understanding of animal behavior, it allows them to learn by doing. The guinea pig video may inform our new pet owner better technique of pet care. (see what’s happening and why and how to correct behavior)

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Challenges

Constructing informed questions
Conceptualizing and Redesigning our app based on insight from our subject matter expert
Transcript Evaluation

Thigmotropic
Incorporating Ideas

Figma

Learning curve
Trying to add audio/video clips in figma

The non collaborative aspect of Arrow

Knowledge Graph

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Future Work

Vet Profile

Vet to Pet Owner Forum

Admin responsibility (vet approved)
Integration with Pet Owner Profile

Vet to Vet Forum

Medical Focused

Document Sharing
Keyword Extraction

The next large-scale iteration over the project should include the expansion of the Vet functionality. They have the ability to approve posts, higher priority posting, and complex integration with a pet owner. The next iteration should delve into fleshing out what that would look like and how best to provide administrative responsibilities, without total control.

Interviewee mentioned in the interview the importance of keeping pet owner forums and vet centric forums separate. He suggested that if pet owners entered into their forums (with mostly medical jargon) it would confuse the pet owners more than help. Based on that the next iteration could flesh out the vet centric forum, and induce another round of interviews focusing on developing a useful taxonomy to facilitate medical focused search capabilities. And add more functionality for document/article sharing.

The app would have two separate forums. One for Vet to Pet Owner interactions and one for Vet-to-Vet interactions, completely separate from each other.

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Questions?

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Resources