PawSociety
Designing Joy, One Paw at a Time
Project Type
End-to-End Mobile App
Scope of Work
UX Research, UX/UI Design
Tools
Figma, Canva, Adobe Illustrator
Domain
Social Networking, Community&Connection
Client
Personal Project
Date
March 2025
Project Overview
Background
As a lifelong animal lover and design enthusiast, I saw a gap in the digital space for a platform that truly centers pets and their people. While mainstream social apps allow users to share pet content, they often lack the warmth, specificity, and community-driven features that pet owners crave. After moving to a new city with limited local connections, I realized how powerful a pet-focused network could be for forging friendships, sharing milestones, and supporting adoption efforts.
This led to the creation of PawSociety, a concept for a social networking platform that connects pet owners through shared love, care, and companionship. The project explores how thoughtful UX design can foster emotional connection, encourage positive engagement, and support real-world impact in pet communities.
Problem
Pet owners often feel isolated or lack a community to share their experiences and milestones with. While platforms like Instagram exist, they don’t offer pet-specific features like pet profiles, playdate matching, or park search options.
There’s a need for a platform where pet owners can easily discover local parks to take their pets to or to connect other pet owners, share their pet daily-quirky behaviors and have a dedicated space where they can express the joy of pet ownership.
Connect with other pet owners based on location, pet type, or shared interests
Create a personalized pet profile to showcase their companion’s personality, photos, and milestones
Discover pet-friendly events or playdates through location-based features or suggestions
Build a niche, engaged social community centered around positive pet-related content
Increase retention by providing meaningful, pet-driven interactions rather than general social noise
Establish a brand identity that’s warm, trustworthy, and distinctly pet-first
Goals
“How might we create a joyful and pet-centered social experience that helps owners connect, share, and build community around their companions?”
Key Features
Key Features
PawSociety offers a joyful and pet-centered social experience with features designed specifically for pet owners. Users can create detailed pet profiles that highlight their companions’ personalities, milestones, and photos. The app includes a playful photo and video feed where pet lovers can share updates and interact using custom reactions like 🐾 and 🦴. A built-in friend and playdate finder helps users connect with other nearby pet owners based on pet type or interests, while milestone badges celebrate special moments like birthdays or "Gotcha Days." The platform also promotes local engagement through pet-friendly event discovery and features a “Pet-of-the-Day” spotlight to encourage user participation and build community. Every feature reinforces PawSociety’s mission to bring pet owners together in a fun, meaningful, and heartwarming way.
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Research
User Interviews
User Surveys
Competitive Research
Affinity Mapping
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Define
POV & HMW Statements
User Personas
Feature List
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Ideate
User & Task Flows
Initial Sketches
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
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Design
Branding & Logo Design
High-Fidelity Wireframes
Prototyping
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Testing
User Usability Testing
High Priority Revisions
Research
User Interviews
The primary goal of the user interviews is to understand how pet owners currently share pet-related content, build connections with other pet lovers, and what features or experiences they feel are missing from existing social platforms — in order to design a more joyful, pet-centered social experience tailored to their needs.
Specifically, the objectives were to:
Understand how pet owners currently share and celebrate their pets online
Identify pain points with existing social media platforms
Explore how pet owners form connections with other pet lovers
Discover motivations behind sharing pet content
Uncover desired features or tools that are currently missing
Gauge interest in joining a new pet-focused social platform
Evaluate emotional tone and visual expectations
Participants:
6 Pet Owners (dogs, cats, and one rabbit)
Ages 24–42
Mix of urban and suburban locations
5 use Instagram, 3 use Facebook Groups, 0 use pet-specific apps
“My dog has more photos on my phone than anyone else — I just wish there was a space where I could post them without feeling silly or spammy.”
Key Insights
There’s a desire for a platform where pets are the main characters, not an add-on to a human-centric experience.
Users feel limited by current platforms’ structure and culture:
Low engagement from fellow pet lovers.
Lack of organization tools (e.g., tagging by pet, health, age).
Feeds diluted by unrelated or negative content.
Owners want to connect with others based on shared breed, pet age, location, or experiences (e.g., rescue stories, training struggles).
Local playdate coordination and breed-specific chats are highly desired.
Pet parents actively document milestones (e.g., first walk, adoption day), but lack a focused way to display or revisit these memories.
Platforms that help them feel seen and supported as pet parents create stickiness and trust.
Similar Capabilities:
Target audience is mostly pet owners (mostly dogs)
Location based discovery
Apparent Differences:
Only Meet My Doggo has Social Feed
Only Pawdate and Meet My Doggo have Playdate Matching
Pawdate and Meet My Doggo have In-App Messaging
Pawdate and DogPack have Event Creation
None has Community Forums
Only PawDate has Multi-Pet Profiles
Only Meet My Doggo has Pet Media Sharing
Key Learnings:
Most apps are dog-focused and exclude other pets, leaving a gap for a broader audience
Lack of personalized and detailed pet profiles beyond basic info like breed and age
Limited forums or discussion spaces where pet owners can ask questions, share tips, and support each other
Opportunities:
Broader Inclusion: By focusing on multiple pet types (dogs, cats, etc.) for wider audience reach
Pet Media Sharing & Social Feed: Combining pet media sharing with playdate matching and event creation makes the app more dynamic and interactive
Community Building: Adding forums or discussion boards allows for deeper engagement between users
Safety & Verification: While competitors have safety features, you can emphasize profile verification, event safety tips, and pet health information for safe interactions
Pet-Centric Profiles
Community Matching & Discovery
Joyful Life Logging & Celebrations
Positive, Safe, and Pet-Loving Atmosphere
Competitive Analysis
To start the process of understanding the need of the app in the community, I completed a competitive analysis of similar platforms (Pawdate, Meet My Doggo, and Dogpack) and revealed the following findings:
Key Insights:
Build pet-first profiles and memory timelines to honor the emotional bond between owner and pet
Create a dedicated pet social space with relevant discovery, pet-specific tagging, and community-first design
Facilitate breed- and interest-based group discovery and location-based meetups for deeper engagement
Include joyful, celebratory features like milestone badges, automated memory posts, and reminders
Integrate lightweight utility tools (health logs, Q&A, lost pet alerts) into a social context
Build a playful, affirming environment with pet-friendly reactions (e.g., tail wags, purrs), and de-emphasize vanity metrics
Affinity Mapping
User insights were then categorized into an affinity map for better analysis.
Design Opportunities
Define
After collecting data and insights from my interviews and surveys, I decided to dive a bit deeper to compile a couple of ‘Point of View’ (POV) and ‘How Might We’ (HMW) statements to understand and highlight the pain points that users see in order to create better user personas. The statements that I crafted from my research are as follows:
POVs
Pet parents who see their animals as family need a meaningful way to celebrate and share their pets’ lives because current social platforms don't give pets the spotlight they deserve.
Pet lovers who share daily moments of joy or struggle feel unseen on mainstream platforms because those spaces aren’t built with pets or their communities in mind.
Pet owners want to connect with others who “get it” — whether by breed, behavior, or location — but existing tools make finding those people difficult or impersonal.
Pet parents want to celebrate moments big and small, but mainstream platforms lack ways to track or highlight the meaningful details of their pets’ journeys.
Pet lovers are tired of toxic, competitive online spaces and long for a wholesome, playful environment where kindness and pet joy come first.
HMWs
HMW help users tell their pet’s story as the main character, not as a sidekick?
HMW create a dedicated space that elevates pet content above unrelated noise?
HMW enable authentic connections through shared pet traits or challenges?
HMW encourage shared joy through community recognition of milestones?
HMW design a social experience that prioritizes empathy, positivity, and play?
After I have clearly defined and articulated my users’ needs and challenges through the personas, the next step of my design process was to compile a list of features that would address those needs.
Key Features:
Pet-Centric Profiles
Create a unique profile for each pet (name, breed, age, bio, quirks)
Upload a gallery of pet photos/videos.
Community Discovery & Matching
Smart matching with other users by:
Breed
Location
Pet age or health status
Shared hobbies (e.g., agility, therapy animals)
Interest-based community groups (e.g., “Senior Dogs,” “Black Cats Club”).
Local meetups & virtual event coordination.
Social Sharing & Interaction
Feed to share photos, stories, and questions.
Comment threads designed for supportive engagement
These statements help me to develop 2 user personas that will be the center of my design. The two personas have their own distinct challenges and goals in building new connections. Their pain points that I have uncovered from my research would be the foundational centerpiece of my design as I move forward in my design process.
Ideate
The next step was to create a sitemap and a user flow to map out the paths a user might take to complete a task within the website.
With these diagrams in hand, I proceeded with the next step of designing the initial sketches. I took inspirations from similar social-networking sites such as Instagram and also pet applications like Rover to design a fun and engaging app that can serves and addresses the needs of the users and at the same time showcasing their joy and life as pet parents.
In order to confirm the viability and accessibility of my lower-fidelity wireframes, I moved forward with the design process and started to bring these designs into a higher-fidelity wireframing. I then seek feedback from some of the users that I have interviewed to ensure that my design makes sense and able to provide the necessary information and actions for users to perform and complete the task.
Design
With mid-fidelity design in place, it was time to come up with the branding for my Pet-Loving App.
Brand Design
With the components and the key features all figured out, I moved forward with the creation of high-fidelity model of the application. Using the feedback I’ve received from the user testings, I added a couple more frames to provide instructions of the feature for better accessibility and functionality of the feature.
With these high-fidelity wireframes structured, I developed a prototype in Figma in order to test out the main user flows:
Onboarding Flow
Discover & Connect with Others Flow
Find a Local Pet-Friendly Park Flow
-Companionship-Community-Care&Compassion-Joy-
Testing
After the completion of my prototype, I conducted a usability testing with the help of 5 participants. The participants were a mixture of pet owners with different types of pets such as dogs, cats, and rabbit. The test goals were:
Evaluate how easily users can complete the onboarding process and build a Paw account.
Assess users’ ability to connect with another Paw member in the society.
Identify how easily users can find a local park nearby.
Testing Insights:
Users loved creating pet profiles. This feature resonated strongly with the emotional bond they share with their pets.
Users quickly understood the app’s purpose and appreciated that it felt made for them — a space free from traditional social media pressure.
Participants
5 users, ages 21-35
Mix of pet owners
Urban and Suburban
Success Metrics
Achievement Rate: 96%
Avg. Time on Task: 1 min 30 sec
SUS Score: 86.5
Brand Engagement: 4.75/5
User Confidence: 4.80/5
Likelihood to Use: 4.75/5
Areas for improvement:
Create milestone tagging within posts.
Redesign community filters for better local + interest discovery.
Add utility features (e.g., health logs, Q&A).
Elevate emotional storytelling through memory features and celebratory moments.
Conclusion
Designing this pet-centered social networking app has been a deeply rewarding and personal journey. From the start, I was driven by the desire to create a space that celebrates the love, joy, and connection we share with our pets—a space that didn’t yet exist in the social media landscape. Through user interviews, empathy mapping, and iterative usability testing, I was able to design experiences that reflect what pet parents truly want: a joyful, emotionally resonant platform where their pets are seen, celebrated, and supported. Every design choice—from playful interactions to pet-first profiles—was grounded in the insights I gathered and the emotional nuances I observed. This process has not only strengthened my belief in human-centered design, but also reminded me how meaningful digital spaces can be when they reflect the real, heartfelt stories of the people (and animals) who use them.