HCDE Masters Capstone - Foster Parent Communication
The Challenge
The Solution
How can we better support the experience for foster pet parents and encourage more people to foster?
Fosters need to feel heard and valued and have open communication with the organizations teams.
Fosters need consistent and reliable access to animal information such as behavior notes, medical information or supplies.
Fosters need a place to socialize with other fosters.
Mobile Application for Fosters to connect with the organizations.
Automated Check-in with the foster
Animal profile with quick access to behavior and medical information
Resources and Videos the provide foster guidance
Community for sharing information, and staying connected
The Process
Surveys and Interviews
We began with research into pain points of organizations. We gathered information by gathering contact information from Petfinder.com. We then sent out a Google Forms survey, to which we received over 600 responses. We followed up with some survey respondents and were able to interview several people.
The major responses were lack of funding, and lack of available foster homes. We decided to delve into why there were not enough foster homes, and saw that many fosters were overwhelmed by the process.
Diary Studies, Journey Mapping,
Following interviews, we were able to get 4 fosters to fully complete a 2 week diary study. This helped us understand daily challenges and achievements in the relationship with the foster animal.
Mapping out the 2 weeks on we saw that most Fosters had around 2 pain points when the foster experience ran astray.
Co-Design Workshop
As the end of our research phase, we scheduled a Co-Design Workshop with our fosters. This activity occurred virtually over Zoom, we walked our users through two activities, one to further clarify their pain and gain points, and the second to start generating ideas on how to alleviate their frustrations.
As a result, we found that the Fosters:
Fosters struggled with delayed communication from organizations
organizations do not have infrastructure to properly support fosters
Community is why fosters come back, and it needs to be stronger
Initial Design
Based on our ideation and information architecture we created a low fidelity prototype and built out the major sections we were hoping to receive feedback on when user testing. From our research and co-design session we knew it was important to include a check-in with organization flow, community section, and an area where fosters can reach out to organizations specifically for help with behavior, medical, or other needs.
Final Design
We conducted 2 rounds of Rapid Iteration testing to ensure that our design was going in the right direction and effectively solving the problem.
We revisited some navigation issues, search functionality, and generally made the features clearer. We also addressed what would be incorporated in the community section, based on the fosters expressed need to “have the support of others with similar experiences.”