PetsCare — Designing a Shared Digital Pet Health Record
UX Design Competition Project ｜ Focus: Research, Stakeholder Insights & Strategy
A concept-driven UX project exploring how pet owners, veterinarians, and clinics can collaborate through a unified health record system.
Role: UX/UI Researcher
Industry: Pets, Designer Competition
Date: Sep - Dec 2022
Background & Challenge
[About the Competition]
The Unicorn Designer Program is a competition designed to cultivate UX professionals. The team I participated in focused on the concept of a digital pet medical record system, aiming to reduce communication barriers between pet owners and veterinarians. Through a structured process of problem definition, competitive analysis, user interviews, and iterative product prototyping, we delivered a comprehensive proposal and conceptualized a promising digital solution.
[About the Project]
Pet medical records are often fragmented across clinics, paper documents, and personal notes.
For pet owners, this creates confusion and stress—especially during urgent or long-term care situations.
This project explored a core question:
How might we design a digital system that supports collaboration between pet owners, veterinarians, and clinics—while respecting their different needs and responsibilities?
Rather than starting from features, the challenge was to balance multiple perspectives and design a system grounded in trust, clarity, and shared understanding.
Understanding
I led and contributed to research across three key stakeholder groups to understand their goals, constraints, and pain points.
My role included：
Competitive analysis (fully led)
Interview guide design (co-led)
User flow
Insight synthesis & strategic framing
Usability testing participation
Competitive Analysis
Understanding the Gaps in Existing Pet Health Record Solutions
Analysis Scope & Criteria
The competitive analysis focused on digital pet health record and care-tracking products currently available on the market, including both core competitors and adjacent solutions.
The evaluation was guided by two primary questions:
For pet owners:
Can they easily and consistently record health-related data without feeling overwhelmed?For veterinarians:
Can relevant medical information be quickly extracted to support clinical judgment?
To answer these questions, competitors were assessed across the following dimensions:
Information architecture & navigation
Clarity of system feedback and status
Interaction consistency
New-user friendliness
Error prevention
Efficiency for both owners and professionals
Key Findings from Competitive Review
1. Usability Is Often Optimized for One Role—Not Collaboration
Most products showed a strong bias toward either pet owners or veterinarians:
Some tools allowed owners to log extensive daily data but made it difficult for doctors to locate critical information efficiently
Others prioritized medical detail but assumed users already had sufficient domain knowledge, resulting in poor onboarding and steep learning curves
👉 Insight:
Existing solutions treat health records as personal logs rather than shared decision-support tools.
2. Navigation and Information Hierarchy Are Frequent Pain Points
Across multiple competitors, issues repeatedly appeared:
Overloaded home screens with low-priority features surfaced too early
Inconsistent navigation patterns between main pages and sub-pages
Key actions hidden behind unclear icons or mislabeled menu items
These issues increased cognitive load—especially for users under stress.
👉 Insight:
When information hierarchy is unclear, users spend time searching instead of understanding.
3. Language and Feedback Undermine Trust
Several competitors suffered from:
Poor or incomplete localization
Ambiguous system feedback
Unclear status indicators during data input or loading
For a domain closely tied to emotional stress and responsibility, these details significantly affected user confidence.
👉 Insight:
In healthcare-related contexts, clarity and reassurance are as important as functionality.
4. Feature-Rich Does Not Equal Beginner-Friendly
While some platforms offered extensive functions and visualized historical data, they often lacked:
Clear onboarding flows
Contextual explanations for medical terms
Progressive disclosure of complexity
As a result, new users struggled to understand what to do next.
👉 Insight:
Without intentional guidance, feature richness becomes a barrier rather than a benefit.
Design Opportunities Identified
Synthesizing these findings revealed several strategic opportunities that directly informed the PetCares concept:
Layered information design to serve both beginners and experts
Role-based visibility instead of one-size-fits-all interfaces
Timeline-based records that tell a story rather than present raw data
Calm, human-centered language to reduce anxiety and support decision-making
Rather than competing on the number of features, PetCares positions itself around clarity, trust, and shared understanding.
How This Analysis Shaped the Design Direction
This competitive analysis did not aim to replicate existing products.
Instead, it clarified what not to optimize for.
By identifying patterns of confusion, overload, and role misalignment, the analysis reinforced a core design intention:
“A pet health record should not merely store data—it should support collaboration, trust, and timely understanding. “
This insight became a foundational principle guiding the system architecture, user flows, and experience strategy of PetCares.
Stakeholder Research
🐶 Pet Owners
Struggle to track medical history across clinics
Experience anxiety when information is incomplete
Want reassurance and continuity of care
🩺 Veterinarians
Limited consultation time
Need fast access to accurate medical history
Concerned about data reliability
🏥 Clinics
Operational pressure and record management burden
Legal responsibility for medical data
Hesitant about system changes without clear value
User Key Insights
From synthesizing research across stakeholders, several critical insights emerged:
No single user owns the entire medical journey.
Any effective solution must support collaboration rather than individual optimization.Trust is more important than feature richness.
Accuracy, source clarity, and responsibility matter more than advanced functions.Information needs differ by role and moment.
The same data must be presented differently depending on context and urgency.Emotional reassurance is part of the experience.
Especially for pet owners, medical records are tied to anxiety and care responsibility.
Key Insights
✨
Key Insights ✨
Transform
Instead of jumping into UI design, I focused on defining strategic boundaries and system logic.
Key strategic decisions included：
Role-based access & visibility
Different stakeholders see different layers of information.Shared record, distributed responsibility
Clinics maintain authority; owners gain transparency.Timeline-based structure
Medical history presented as a narrative, not a data dump.Calm, supportive tone
Especially in moments of uncertainty.
User Journey
User Flow
Flows were designed to reduce cognitive load while supporting quick decision-making.
Usability Testing & Iteration
Usability testing helped validate whether the system logic matched user expectations:
Pet owners felt more reassured seeing a complete timeline
Veterinarians appreciated faster context-building
Clinics raised concerns that helped refine permission boundaries
“It feels less like a database, and more like a shared understanding.”
Reflection
PetCares represents how I approach UX beyond interfaces:
Designing systems that balance structure and empathy,
and translating complex, multi-stakeholder needs into intentional experiences.
This project strengthened my interest in UX strategy, service design, and research-driven decision-making, especially in domains where trust and responsibility are central.
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