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No Animals Get Left Behind.
Helping adopters refrain from giving up.
In the US, 3.9 million animals are surrendered each year, out of which 38% of dogs surrendered due to behavior and 56% of cats surrendered due to the adopter’s personal reasons. We decided to focus on this area, and for the scope, we decided to focus on The Humane Society of Greater Savannah.
Research Phase
Initially, with the help of research, we observed the stakeholders which are part of this entire ecosystem such as pet cafes where people can spend time with cats before they adopt, vet clinics for medical assistance, food pantries to provide food, Chatham country animal shelter to help with strays, donors, and thrift shops to provide financial assistance to the shelter. We found that Surrender, adopters, and fosters are the key actors and while talking to the director of the shelter, we found a big area of opportunity in the environment is Surrenders.
ECOSYSTEM MAP
Gender: Female
Age: 24 YO
Status: Single
Education: Master’s degree in Animation
Occupation: International Student
Income: $11,000 per year
Isabelle
"I am a cat person and often feed the feral cats next to the house."
USER PERSONAS
Wants & Needs
-
I want to have a cat in the rental house.
-
When I graduate, I hope that my cat will be able to fly with me on international flights with simple procedures.
Frustations
As an international student studying in a foreign country, she sometimes think of my cat back home when she is particularly stressed. Wished to had one here, but it's hard with landlord's contracts and pets flying on planes.
Gender: Female
Age: 42 YO
Status: Married
Occupation: Supply Chain Manager for Johnson & Johnson
Income: 122,000 / year
Jelena
“She has some food aggression at times but she was very gentle with the kids. They just stressed her out immensely at such a young age and I didn't want that for her.”
Wants & Needs
As a working woman, she does not have time to train the dog, and she relies entirely on her children and husband to do all dog-related chores.
Frustations
A dog has behavioral issues as a result of previous trauma, and children are unable to take proper care of her. She feels she made the wrong decision in adopting a dog.
Surrender
For surrender, people go through with the shelter and discovered that surrenders must complete a lengthy questionnaire on the shelter's website in order to provide facts and the reason for their surrender. They can also contact shelter staff to learn more about the procedure and make an appointment by phone. When they arrive at the shelter, they have to do the necessary paperwork and pay the surrender costs to finish the process.
User Journey
Service Blueprint
USER JOURNEY & SERVICE BLUEPRINT
Adoption
People interested in adopting a pet from the shelter they go to the shelter's website and look at the pet profile, which is hosted on Petango, a third-party service used by the shelter. The pets can also be found on other websites such as Petfinder. They go to shelters with the necessary documentation, as specified on their website. They can spend time with the pets in the areas they have set aside for that purpose if they so desire. They can take the pet on the same day if they are completely satisfied.
Service Blueprint
User Journey
ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
Discover why people surrender animals after adoption.
It is divided into 3 categories: behavior, user, and environment. The user they have financial problems, like unemployment. Visibility refers to a number of issues that are invisible to adopters after they adopt a pet; when the pet has bad behavior happening, the pet owners will be afraid and they do not know how to deal with these problems.
Problem
PROBLEM STATEMENT
How might we reduce the number of animals returned to the shelter without overburdening the staff and while still providing accurate information about the pets and useful assistance to the owner?
Ideation
NEW SERVICE BLUEPRINT
Adoption
Here adopters can see the pet profile created by the previous owner. When this is done, the adopter can go to the shelter to adopt the pet; after adopting, the shelter will provide free exit consultation for the adopter.
Surrender
When people want to surrender an animal, they browse the HSGS website. Created the profile for their pet, which is an id card. HSGS staff will contact you with the information you fill out for a consultation, and when some are confirmed, surrender can go to the shelter and give them their pets.
INFORMATION CARD
In the new information cards, we are designing for reduced cognitive load. You can see a couple of pictures of the pet.. its name on top.. the sliders and icons about what other types of animals or people she is good or bad with. We have used various visuals tools to make the information look easy to understand. At the bottom the card includes things which are sort of negative but informative for further adopters to consider to reduce surrender.
COUNSELLING SESSIONS
Suggesting mandatory post-adoption assistance for all adopters. this will be done through meetings scheduled at regular intervals over 3 months. showing value along the way. the user will be asked direct and pointed questions about how the animal is doing and offered resources to help. As the user gets accustomed to receiving help and advice through this channel. This reduces the stigma and will open it up for them to be able to easily ask for help down the road.
Solutions
SURRENDERING FORM
While the pet owners are surrendering their emotions are at the peak so we want the process to be easy and not triggering their emotion. We generated a gamified surrender process. As the user fill each section they can see coloured paw prints.Here we also added a feature of revisiting the form and filling them whenever the user has time making it more convenient.
Takeaways
This initiative helps us understand how the system works inside the Humane Society. There were many departments whose activity were intertwined. Our team was attempting to provide specific solutions that would allow us to have an effect at the shelter while not interfering with the Humane Society's regular duties. The blueprint assists us in understanding the on-stage and backstage interactions, whilst the ecosystem map was valuable in clarifying the existence of stakeholders and how they produce value for one another.
Ecosystem Mapping, User Journey, User personas, Root cause Analysis, Service Blueprint and Scope of improvements
Process
Service Designer
Role
Figma, Adobe Creative Suites, Procreate
Tools
Sept 2022 - Nov 2022
Timeframe
Brianna Goebel (Service Design)
M.I. Sree Sevithaa (Service design)
Jingwen Chen (Industrial Design)
Team
Greater Savannah Humane Society sees a society that recognizes, values, and promotes the ways in which pets enrich our lives. We collaborated with the shelter as part of our class project to identify opportunity areas in their existing system and propose some measures to improve their services.
For these reasons we chose to have our solutions preemptive and multipronged. After ideation and rating the possible solutions we were able to combine some of our strongest ideas. First we will solve for the lack of information while putting the burden on the families surrendering the pets rather than the shelter staff. We will gamify the survey and focus on showing value as well as progress. Second we will work on de-stigmatizing asking for help by providing mandatory post adoption meetings at scheduled intervals. ( 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months and 3 months).
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