The Sprint Challenge
One of my greatest fears as a pet owner is losing track of my cats. Whenever I spend an extended time away from home, my first worry isn't if I left the oven on, it is if I left the door cracked. Both of my cats are homebodies who would not survive a day out in the wild, but even in my parents' case, being loving owners of a voracious outdoor cat, they still worry about their cat's well-being on the occasion he isn't home for dinner. This design sprint aims to ease the worry pet owners feel about their pet's well-being by redesigning the traditional cat collar.
Timeframe:
- This quarter: Finalize design details and gain stakeholders
- Next quarter: Allocate sources for manufacturing product, gain partnership with FitBit
- Next year: First finished prototype
- 3 years from now: Nationwide distribution of the Angel Collar
Team Makeup
- Jordan McFaul: communication studies student
- Teri McFaul: marketing manager at Intel, engineer
- Kirk McFaul: hardware engineer at Intel
- Katie McFaul: software developer at Red Hat
The McFaul family encompasses the ideal team for the Angel Collar design sprint because we are all cat owners, cat enthusiasts, and prospective users of the Angel Collar. Our team as a whole also has experience with marketing and software development to aid in the development and promotion of our design.
Methods
For our design sprint, we followed the 5 phases of Google's design sprint process; understanding, sketching, deciding, prototyping, and validating.
Phase 1: Understand
To get a better understanding of the problem and the challenges we'll face, we divided and conquered the topics relevant to our design through the process of Lightning Talks. This allowed us to gain a fuller understanding of the problem we're trying to solve by exploring its obstacles through all relevant angles.
The topics we identified as most important included: user needs, business goals and obstacles, competitors, and technological requirements.
Each member of the team has different strengths and experience in the topics at hand so it made the most sense for us to assign each member to a topic, research it further, then reconvene to share our findings. Jordan researched user needs and goals of prospective users. Teri used her experience in marketing to research business goals and business obstacles. Kirk used his experience in hardware engineering to look at competitors in our product field and gauge how their products currently work. Katie used her experience in software engineering to explore the technological requirements we'd need to meet to create a smart mobile app.
Key Findings:
- User's primary concern is the safety of their pet — the collar needs safety features.
- High technological requirements for hardware: device needs to monitor heart rate, location, and power a camera on a reasonable battery life (goal of 7 days+ battery life). Idea to partner with a company that already produces this technology, such as Fitbit (a health monitoring wrist watch for humans). Our product would launch a new line for them and utilize their technology in the collar's design.
- There are many competitors for generic cat collars but a gap in the market for "smart" collars that report information on the pet — space for opportunity.
- Our goal as a business is to improve the safety of pets and allow pet-owners to worry less; could gain support from veterinarians. The largest obstacle we'd face as a start up is funding which could be helped by partnering with Fitbit.
Phase 2: Sketch
The Angel Collar has two major design elements: the collar and the smart mobile app. Our team decided that in order to reach the most effective design, we would all produce various designs for the collar and the app through the Crazy 8's method. After the designs were made, we looked through everyone's sketches and voted on each of our favorites through the Crazy 8's Sharing and Voting process.
These methods were chosen to initiate an effective brainstorming session that would produce a number of various design ideas and elements that we could pick from, choose, or combine elements for the final product design. After the Crazy 8 designs were shared and discussed, we started a second round of Solution Sketches that allowed us to refine each of our favorite ideas and combine newly presented ideas.
Phase 3: Decide
To decide on a final product design, we first presented our final Solution Sketches. By this time, our designs were becoming more and more similar because we started incorporating each other's best ideas through the refinement process. This allowed us to use the All-In-One method to decide the final design, combining the favorite designs into a final product that encompassed everything we wanted it to include.
Our combined ideas included a harness option for outdoor cats (less likely to fall off), breakaway buckles (safety feature in case the collar is caught on something), GPS to locate lost cats (or lost collars), a heart rate monitor, a microchip readable by veterinarians that includes owner info, a camera, a port for charging the device, waterproofing the device, and an easily navigable phone app that updates info in real time.
Phase 4: Prototype
To begin our prototyping phase, we decided to use the method of Why, How, Prototype, Iterate (WHPI) because we already had a number of sketches from our sketching phase that could be input to the WHPI iteration process. WHPI helped us create a final working prototype design that accounted for all the features we decided upon.
Phase 5: Validate
The last step in our design sprint was to validate our final design by putting it in front of prospective users to see if our human-centered design approach really resonated with other cat lovers. We used the Stakeholder Review method to pitch our design to a handful of prospective users—grandparent, cousins, and friends who own cats—to gather their impressions and insights on the product. The reviews yielded the following key findings:
- Feedback largely positive—requests to make a similar dog collar in the future for stakeholders that own both dogs and cats
- Interest in projected cost of the product—estimated to be largely more expensive than traditional collars but a more permanent solution that isn't easily lost
- Stakeholders ultimately fans of the design and confirmed as prospective buyers
Challenge Conclusion
The whole team had a lot of fun creating and iterating this design to the final prototype we decided on, but seeing the design resonate with the people we had in mind when first brainstorming the problem was the most fulfilling part. Given the opportunity, we'd like to come back to this design in the future because it is definitely a product my whole family would use and it would help keep pets safer indoors and outdoors, the most popular goal among our prospective users.