Joel Sinnott — Product Designer

I design products and think deeply about how they look, work and feel. Somewhere between ruthless pragmatist and relentless tinkerer.

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Concept and design for mobile app, designed to support people throughout pet ownership

Identitas

Concept and design for mobile app, designed to support people throughout pet ownership

Identitas
My involvement
UX design, UX research, Visual design, Strategy
Client type
Public sector
Worked at
mutoco
Status
Live in Swiss App Store
Three mobile app screens
Three mobile app screens
Hand holding iPhone
Hand holding iPhone
Three mobile app screens
Three mobile app screens
Many mobile app screens
Many mobile app screens

Identitas is the majority state-owned company behind Switzerland’s official animal registries, tracing every cow, pig and horse in the country and registering its dogs and cats. We were approached by them to help envision and build a mobile app for pet owners.

The challenge

There were three things behind Identitas’ push for a mobile app. They were about to launch a GPS pendant for dogs and cats, which needed a companion app to locate pets that go missing. They also wanted to unify digital pet registration, which was spread across multiple services. Beyond these immediate needs, they had a larger ambition: a digital companion for every part of pet ownership, covering education, community, administration, a pet diary, health tracking, and more.

The brief was stacked with ideas but lacked focus. Initially we were asked to more or less just execute on their brief. However, it became clear that a large part of the project would be turning this laundry list of features into a coherent strategy: deciding which ideas mattered most, how they fit together, and what the first version of the app should (and shouldn’t) do.

Setting the direction

We proposed taking a step back to define what the app should be at its core and what could realistically be built in the time available. We also thought about how the app would grow. Which audience would we win over first? Which features are immediately useful to the largest number of pet owners? How crowded is the market for different features? How could each release lay the groundwork for the next? Together with another designer, I set out to shape a proposal for how to answer these questions.

The strategy workshop board in FigJam: goals, needs, competitors and opportunities, an opportunity map and a roadmap
Vision workshop, November 2024Open the board in FigJam

The analysis pointed us in a clear direction.Start with administration and new pet owners.

Features like community, pet diaries and know-how were already offered by plenty of other apps, but few tools helped owners with the administrative side of pet ownership.

We decided to focus on new pet owners. Registration is mandatory for dogs and common for other pets, so nearly all of them pass through Identitas soon after getting their animal. That gives Identitas a built-in acquisition funnel. It also reaches pet owners when the admin load is at its heaviest. A new pet comes with a lot of paperwork, from registration and ownership details to vaccination records, pet passports and insurance. An app that brings all of this together in one place offers immediate, tangible value, and gives Identitas the chance to build a lasting relationship from day one.

Once enough users are on board, the app could expand beyond administration. Guidance on topics like training and everyday care could help owners through their first months, and community features could connect them with each other, for example by using registration data to place new owners of certain breeds or animals in groups where they can share tips and support one another.

Design exploration

Once the strategy had been approved by the client, we began slicing the work and iterating on the primary features. Below are a handful of screens we worked on. You can view the full Figma file here.

We went back and forth with Identitas for weeks, holding weekly reviews, discussing functionality, planning next steps, and then all of a sudden:

A Slack message from the project manager: Identitas is putting the app on hold, effective immediately. Reactions include crying, melting and gravestone emoji.

Conclusion

Over several weeks of weekly reviews with Identitas, we refined the key flows, specified the functionality and planned the releases that would follow. Once the strategy, roadmap and core experience were defined, Identitas took the project in-house to build it with their own team.

The app launched a few months later. The visual design evolved in-house, but the product shipped with the feature set, priorities and core flows defined in our strategy: administration first, aimed at new pet owners, with room to grow into guidance and community.