At Salesforce we were very lucky to get to offer our services as Volunteer Time Off. Time away from our day to day jobs to help charities in need. Guide Dogs came to us in search of an app that could help their dog trainers to bring each of their potential guide dogs through their newly instated program called STEP. Initially the project came to me and I then enlisted other designers and developers to my team.
This was the current document the employees were working from. As you can see at first glance it is daunting and confusing, so it took a while for me to wrap my head around the program itself. To do that we conducted a persona workshop with the Guide Dogs team.
To really understand the STEP program we conducted a persona based workshop with Guide Dogs where we went through each persona that this app would effect and listed their pain points and goals. We then went through a day in the life at the moment and then an "Art of the Possible" user journey.
Now that we had a good idea of what the main vision and goals were for the app we went back to the employees themselves and asked them what pain points they had through the medium of a survey. With nearly 100 responses I then synthesised the results and figured out the main themes. These themes were then presented back to the Guide Dogs where we looked at the most common themes and discussed how we could solve them.
Before I went in to designing an app, I myself had no idea what dog training apps look like so I searched online for examples. I downloaded a few apps to my phone too to get the full experience. This gave me great insight into the main features other apps were using and some layouts that work for on-the-go app use.
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After the research I felt confident to start some wireframes. Starting with low fidelity sketches then artboards in Sketch. All the while keeping an open line of contact with Guide Dogs to make sure we were heading in the right direction.
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Once I had a high level design applied to the prototype I conducted User Testing with the Guide Dog employees. Since this all took place while I was in Dublin and they were in England, also in the hight of the first lockdowns of 2020 all this user testing took place over Google Meet. I asked the users task based questions to guide them through the app. Then I asked some follow up questions and for any feedback. This step was crucial in creating the final design because even after all our research there were sections of the app that needed to be changed after the testing.
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Below is the final design that was sent to the developers. The app needed to be easy to use on the go with not too many features but yet still solving for all the problems the employees had. The app consisted of a list view of the trainer's dogs and a tracker which kept track of the progress of each dog through the STEP program. A knowledge section which went in to more detail of each stage of the STEP program and finally a team section that allows trainers to connect with each other in a community where they can post questions and learn from each other.
The STEP app was received so well that Guide Dogs and Salesforce have won an award this year for the app and their collaboration.
Business Charity Awards 2022: Project of the year - Salesforce and Guide Dogs
