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Helping stray animals

Adopt an animal in one single platform
Status
Live 路 kerubi.es
Team
Carles Javierre 路 DevOps
Ra煤l G贸mez 路 Backend developer
Judit S谩nchez 路 Frontend developer
Agus Ruidiaz 路 Frontend developer
Xavier 路 Developer, scrapping
What did I聽do?

My role

I founded Kerubi in 2016. We鈥檝e released three versions of the platform. Currently, we are about to release a new version, which is a decoupled application in AWS, with our own API and a application that is continuously running scrapping animals and adding them to our Database.

As the founder, I played a crucial role in overseeing both the web and mobile applications, I聽took care about the entire process as Research, Product Design, Marketing Design (brand), Coding: I coded the whole front of the platform including the backoffice in HTML, CSS (Tailwind) and some Jquery functions. I coded it to avoid extra work for the front team, so they could focus on the logic and the Laravel API integration.
  • Managing an amazing team of devs, who spend their free time working on this
  • Ideation and conceptualization.
  • Research: some qualitative data from interviews and surveys.
  • Product Design, all the flows, Design System. I designed the website platform.
  • Marketing Design, brand, styles and logo.
  • Coding: I coded the whole front of the platform including the backoffice in HTML, CSS (Tailwind) and some Jquery functions. I coded it to avoid extra work for the front team, so they can focus on the logic and the Laravel API integration.
The Problem

300.000 animals abandoned

It is disheartening to acknowledge that, in Spain, 300,000 animals are abandoned annually, as reported by the Affinity Foundation. These animals are the fortunate ones saved by shelters, making the actual number closer to 350k.

There are more than 1500 animal shelters in Spain, and all of them are overloaded taking care about stray animals, and many of them don't have enough resources to deal with so many animals and they don't have the online visibility than they deserve.
Trend in the number of animals admitted to companion animal shelters each year
The users

Understanding adopters and shelters

I've been a volunteer and a foster home for more than 15 years. More than 200 animals have been living in my home during all those years and I've met more than 100 animal shelters, 300 adopters. So I'm more than aware of all the problems involved in adopting an animal, what are the adopters concerns and animal shelter needs.

In this scenario, there are two primary user groups: adopters and animal shelters, resembling a B2C and B2B model. However, it's essential to note that Kerubi operates as an NGO, meaning all services provided are free. In all these years, I have been able to gather information about the following:
Big Animal Shelters
  • Type: Foundations, sanctuaries, public and private shelters
  • They have a physical shelter
  • They have more than 100 animals.
  • They make around 20 adoptions per month.
  • They receive public funds and private donations.
  • They are able to have at least 5 employees and more than 20 volunteers.
  • They have a website and they are able to have a developer to manage their web and all IT related stuff.
  • They can have someone dedicated 100% to social media, employee or volunteer.
  • Demographic:聽Mostly often run by women between 35-55 years old, with a big commitment to animal rights, driven and optimistic. I聽consider their tech background level as middle, they are able to run social media but they don't want to spend more time than necesary on technology, they want to focus on saving animals
  • Needs:聽Speed up adoptions
Small Animal Shelters
  • Type: Private shelters and cat colonies.
  • They don't usually have a physical shelter, they have foster homes.
  • They have less than 30 animals.
  • They don't receive public funds, they put their own money and sometimes receive private donations
  • They rarely have a website, they don't have the budget to afford it and neither does anyone with a minimum of knowledge to manage it.
  • They can have someone dedicated 100% to social media, volunteer.
  • Demographic:聽Same motivations than big animal shelters owners but younger, around 聽25-54 years old. Their technology background is higher, more close to digital natives.
  • Needs:聽More online visibility for their animal shelters and their animals
Personas 路 Animal shelters
Adopter 路 cats
  • Demographic:聽Most cat adopters are between 20-60 years old. Regarding their background there are no findings on that. Adopters are 50-50 men and women
  • Needs:聽Adopt a new cat and they are asking for advice on how to manage a new family member
  • Frustrations:聽Looking for a new cat adoptions is messy, they try to search on Google, poor results, only big animal shelters and sometimes they want to help small ones. They try to avoid scamms.
Adopter 路 dogs
  • Demographic:聽Most dogs adopters are between 20-50 years old, younger than cat adopters. Dogs need to go for a walk regularly, at least three times per day according to Spanish law, so dogs are more demanding than the cats.
  • Needs:聽They also need advice about how to educate an animal, and many of them make the same mistake, a puppy is not always the best, sometime is better to adopt an adult, so they know how to go for a walk or poop in the street better than in home
Personas 路 Adopters
Setting the goals

Ideation

No one was rushing me, so I聽took my time to think. The thing is that I聽wanted to build something to help stray animals, that was the goal. I聽set some specific goals for the product:
  • A platform to adopt, powered by animal shelters and used by adopters.
  • The platform would give extra visibility to small animal shelters.
  • Animal shelters will upload their animals.
  • Adopters will look for a new family member in 1 single platform, so no matter if the animal is from a big animal shelter or a small one, animals will have same chance to be adopted.
  • The platform would give extra visibility to small animal shelters.
  • SEO is a high priority.
  • There should a message system or chat to allow animal shelters and adopters communicate each other.
  • There is no money but my mine, so technically what I聽know best is WordPress and a listing template.
  • Platform will require registration for both users, shelters and adopters, to avoid scam and spam.
  • All kind of species will be allowed, legal species: Dogs, Cats, Hamsters, Rabiits, Birds, some Reptiles and farm animals.
  • The shelter is the one that takes the decision if an adopter is suitable or not to adopt an animal, so we don't interfere in that decision.
  • Success: When an animal shelter upload their first animal or an adopter finds what he or she is looking for.
  • Aha路moment: When the animal shelter receives a message from an adopter or the adopter get answered by the animal shelter.
What about big animal shelters?
I聽had a lot of questions to answer: what makes me think that big animal shelters will register in Kerubi? What's my proposal for them? Am I聽adding any value to them? The answers were clear, I聽needed to focus on something where they don't need to waste time and makes their lifes easier, all big animal shelters have websites, they won't upload content to Kerubi if they don't need to, what if they don't need to upload anything? what if it's automated? what if we have scrap to gather all the data from their websites? That's how our Robot was born :)
The birth of the Robot
The concept was born, so I聽hired a developer to make it happen, I聽can manage WordPress on my own but I'm not a backend developer.

There was a huge problem, NGO websites are messy, information is unorganized, sometimes you can find the animal name in a H1, or in a span, dates are totally different DD-MM-YYYY or MM-YY, etc.

First and foremost, we couldn't build a unique scrapper, instead, we needed to create a scraper for each animal shelter. That's precisely what we did, creating a parent scraper and then individual child scrapers adapted to each specific animal shelter. To gather the info we used XPath, but it wasn't so powerful so we relied on Regular Expressions, the closest language to Klingon.
Low level flow 路 Kerubi
User Flows
Adopter
The main action for an adopter, is to look for an animal using the listing, filtering, and then send a message to an animal shelter. Register is mandatory to avoid spam.
Adopter user flow 路 Sending a message to the shelter
Animal shelter
The main action for an animal shelter is to upload their animals including all the metadata related, images, name, breed, date of birth, sex and description.
Animal shelter user flow 路 Uploading an animal
The Brand

Kawaii style

The goal of the brand design was to try to reflect the innocence of animals or to show the lack of protection they have towards humans. And there is only one style that represents that concept, Kawai, a japanese cute style, maybe naive, but visually powerful.
Brand
Main logo and identity illustrations
Warming up

Wireframes

I聽created 1 wireframe per screen: Homepage, Listings, Animal detail page, Shelter detail page, Dashboards, etc
Home and animal detail page
Dashboard and listing pages
Make it real

Designs

I聽designed every single detail and implemented it in the WordPress site. Sometimes I聽needed to customize some CSS rules, but I聽could manage that, I聽designed some basic UI聽Kit, not a design system, which allowed me to design faster and smarter.
UI kit 路 Forms 路 Card components 路 Toasts
Website
Final designs
Mobile App
Flow and screens 路 Onboarding 路 Register 路 Login
Flow and screens 路 Onboarding 路 Register 路 Login
What's next

The API and a custom website

After the release of the current WordPress, I聽put togheter a group of developers, volunteers, to build a 2.0 website, with our own API, backend in Laravel and front in React.js, everything hosted in AWS, which by the way they give us free credits as we are an NGO.

I wanted again to recover what I knew about frontend development. In this case I聽didn't want to use any CMS, and I聽picked up Tailwind framework wich allowed me to build the whole website in HTML and CSS, that way frontend team didin't need spent time on that, because it was already coded.
404 page
Donation
Kerubers board
Uploading an animal
Profile Settings
Sign Up
Currently, we are building the 2.0 version, which will be implemented in various countries, if you'd like to support us or make a donation, please feel free to do so.


Wish us all the best ^^