Bichineo

Project overview

Only in Brazil are, approximately, over 170k animals in shelters. The persons who work with it face many obstacles from the hard work to find good adopters to how to raise money to pay their debts and new rescues.
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This project was to develop an app to help these NGOs and Shelters during their whole process. We want to help them to find good adopters, to raise money for them to keep working, and promote their adoption events.
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During the project, we found some key insights through interviews with experts that help us to improve the results.

My contributions

I conducted an extensive research process, which included semi-structured interviews with NGO volunteers, construction of a qualitative and quantitative form, and analysis of all data collected.
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After this research process, I designed the application taking into account all the findings and the prioritization of features.

Discovery: research & analysis

For the research process, I conducted semi-structured interviews with seven volunteers that work directly rescuing animals. I wrote a script and asked them general questions about their process, from the moment they rescue an animal until they find new families for them. This helped me to understand their work better so I could be immersed in their struggling.
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With these first interviews, I discovered that the main issue is always raising money, especially now with the pandemic donations have decreased. The other main issue is the adoption itself. Is hard to find serious adopters that fit all their requests. As an example, one of the NGOs that we interviewed has more than 2500 animals in their shelter. They depend only on donations and don’t have space to rescue more animals from the streets.
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I also found out that some types of cats and dogs are more easily adopted than others, while some of them wait for years in the shelter. After the interviews, I listened to the recordings again and wrote notes about each one. Each note refers to a sentence or observation said by the interviewee.
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Then I reread all these notes and separated the common themes and opportunities between them. With that separation, I started writing some key insights that I thought would be useful for the project and that I could include as features.

After writing all these key insights into post its on miro, I wrote a detailed report outlining these findings and recommendations and why they are important. always mentioning the interviewees' notes to justify my ideas.

Finally I presented this report to my stakeholders and we defined what our priorities would be among the features described in the report and why we are prioritizing them.

Interview Notes

Themes and Opportunities

Key Insights

Feature Prioritization

Design: concepts & sketching

As the main goal of this project we determine that we need to find new ways to show the animals for possible adopters, find ways were people could “free donate”, help the NGOs and Shelters with promoting their events and create a “find a new friend” environment. We also want to implement a tool where the user can take a test to find their best match animal, this only based on the adopter and the animal personalities.

High fidelity prototype

We used a similar idea as “Tinder” to show the animals. The user can set some preferences in the beginning, such as max distance, type and size of the animal. The users can donate any amount for the NGOs, and they also can watch some adds and donate the money. Other features include a chat with the responsible for the animal, a favorites page that shows all the animals that the user liked, a page with next events and a list with all the NGOs registered in our system.