Role - UX/UI Designer (Self-Directed)
Timeline - 4.5 months
Tools - Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop, Google Forms
Project Scope - Mobile App (Android) + Website Landing Page
Industry - Petconomy (Pet Care)
Collaboration - Individual
CASE STUDY
Putu – Pet Caretaking & Tracking App
Project use case
Putu — short for Pets Unity, Track User — is a self-directed case study for a pet-care app built around one idea: pets are family, and travel shouldn't mean choosing between abandoning your routine or leaving your pet with someone you don't fully trust. The app helps owners find and hire vetted caretakers when they travel, while also giving caretaking itself a way to become real income for the people providing it.
Beyond caretaking, Putu brings together most of what a pet owner actually needs day to day: an interactive map for nearby vets, pet shops, and breeds available for mating; a to-do list that reminds owners of feeding, walks, and other routine care; a social feed where owners share their pets' lives and connect with other pet people; and an advanced tracking layer built around a specialized smartwatch that monitors a pet's emotions, blood flow, and bowel movements — with GPS rings or bracelets for animals a watch doesn't fit — plus a QR code carrying the pet's name, owner's name, and live location in case they go missing.
I designed and researched this independently over about four and a half months, from December 2022 to April 2023, as a way to go through a complete UX process — research, personas, competitor analysis, flows, and a full UI — on a problem I could shape entirely myself.
Problem Statement
Pet owners are stuck choosing between never leaving town and leaving their pet with someone they don't fully trust — and even then, they have no real way to know how their pet is actually doing while they're away. Everyday care adds its own friction on top of that: routines get missed, emergencies are hard to act on quickly, and there's no simple way to find the right vet, the right breed, or even other pet people nearby.
- Travel and daily pet care conflict — carrying a pet everywhere isn't realistic, and neither is leaving them home alone.
- Owners have no reliable way to gauge how a pet is actually feeling, especially from a distance.
- Daily routines like feeding and walks get missed without something to track them.
- Finding a vet during an emergency, or finding the right breed for mating or adoption, has no dedicated path.
- No simple way for pet owners to connect with each other or the wider pet-owner network nearby.
Goals
- Give owners a trustworthy way to hand off pet care while traveling, structured so caretaking is also a real source of income for the people providing it.
- Make a pet's wellbeing checkable from a distance, not just assumed.
- Turn scattered daily pet-care tasks — feeding, walks, vet visits, reminders — into one simple routine.
- Build a space for pet owners to connect with each other, not just manage logistics.
Process
A self-directed project built the way a real one would run — research, personas, competitor benchmarking, and iteration, with no client to answer to but myself.
Define
Set out to solve a problem I'd actually seen: pet owners choosing between missing out on travel or handing their pet to someone they didn't fully trust.
Research
Ran a Google Form survey to check that assumption against real pet owners, then built two personas — a pet owner and a prospective caretaker — from what came back, along with a full empathy map for each.
Ideate
Took the personas' pain points as a starting point, but let new ideas surface once I started sketching rather than locking the feature set early.
Prototype & Testing
Built a fully interactive prototype — 657 frames and states in total — to walk through the experience end to end, including the smaller edge-case screens most flows would skip.
Visual Design
Designed 318 mobile UI screens for Android, plus a website landing page, in Figma — working outward from the personas and flows.
Structure
Organized everything around four core needs — care, safety, connection, and convenience — rather than treating caretaking, tracking, social, and vet-support as four separate features bolted together.
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Research
I ran a real Google Form survey rather than relying on assumptions. Half of respondents had a pet; 41.2% said they'd pay for pet care outright, with another 38.2% open to it. Handing a pet over while traveling was split almost three ways — yes, no, and maybe — which told me trust, not willingness, was the real barrier to solve for. The qualitative answers backed that up: people open to pet-sitting cited safety and companionship for their pet, while people who weren't cited a lack of trust in a stranger, or simply preferring to bring their pet along.
From there, I built two personas — Saro, a 24-year-old pet owner who feels her pets restrict her ability to travel, and Kaali, a 22-year-old student looking for flexible income and pet companionship without the cost of owning one — and mapped an empathy map for each to keep the design grounded in their actual pain points rather than a generic user.
Challenges
Keeping four ideas from feeling like four apps. Bringing several different pet-care needs — caretaker hiring, tracking and safety, social interaction, and vet/emergency support — into one coherent experience was the hardest part of this project. The risk was ending up with features stitched together rather than one product. The fix was structuring everything around four core needs — care, safety, connection, and convenience — so every screen has a clear reason to exist inside that frame, rather than just being a feature that seemed useful on its own.
Justifying the smartwatch without being asked for it. The smartwatch and GPS-tracking layer needed its own reasoning, since it wasn't something survey respondents explicitly requested — it came from a more basic insight: owners want to know their pet is safe, especially while they're away, and a tracking layer answers that directly even without being asked for by name.
Competitor Analysis
I benchmarked against Rover and PetBacker as direct competitors (both pet-sitting apps) and Justdial as an indirect one (a general local-services directory people use informally to find pet care). Across a feature-by-feature comparison — payment, sitter location, profiles, communication, tracking, and more — Rover and PetBacker covered the caretaker-marketplace side well, but neither offered a real pet-social layer, and neither built in the kind of proactive tracking (emotion, location, health) Putu is designed around. Justdial had reach — 156.5 million users against Rover's 2 million and PetBacker's 1 million — but almost none of the app-native experience: no real profiles, no in-app booking, no UI built for the job. That gap between reach and experience is where Putu's actual opportunity sits.
Outcome
Putu isn't a live product — this was a self-directed case study, built to go through a complete UX process end to end rather than to launch a real app, so there's no user or adoption data to report here.
What it gave me was ownership of every decision a client would normally make — defining the problem, running the research, deciding what to build and why, without anyone else setting the direction. I still think about building this further if the right opportunity comes along, but as it stands, it's a full case study I can point to that shows how I actually work when nobody's steering but me.
User Flow
The core path follows a pet owner from recognizing they need care coverage — searching for a caretaker, reviewing who's available, and booking — through to staying connected while away via tracking, the to-do list, and the social feed, with the vet/emergency locator available throughout as a safety net rather than a separate destination.
Final Design
The final product centers on four connected needs. Care covers the caretaker marketplace — finding, reviewing, and booking someone to look after a pet while its owner travels, with the same space giving caretakers a way to earn from it. Safety is the tracking layer — a smartwatch, or GPS ring/bracelet for pets it doesn't fit, monitoring a pet's emotions, blood flow, and bowel movements, plus a QR code carrying the pet's and owner's details for lost-pet situations. Connection is the social feed, where owners share their pets' lives and find other pet people nearby. Convenience ties it together — a to-do list with care reminders and an interactive map for nearby vets, pet shops, and breeding options, so nothing about daily care depends on memory alone.
The web-based admin dashboard gives the Area Development Officer tier full oversight — managing members, products, and reports across the whole network from one place.
Ordering follows a familiar pattern — select product and quantity, preview the order, confirm — adapted so a confirmed order lands directly in the seller's queue above it in the hierarchy, ready to pack and send.
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A full UX case study built from the ground up — designing a platform where pet owners can find trusted caretakers while traveling, track their pet's emotional state through a smartwatch, and stay connected through a social feed. Covered the complete process: research, personas, user flows, wireframes, and prototyping.
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