Of course checking statuses, charts and looking at maps is one thing. The real magic is teleporting into your pet’s world. Maria sees that Kim is in the woods behind her house so she decides to dive in and have a look.

She taps the tray icon because that gives her a glance of the day’s pictures while the feed connects. She scrolls through a few. Any she taps will appear full screen with the like and share icon. She then returns to the feed. It’s ready!

A branch appears onscreen and some waving leaves. Maria taps to make the image full screen. An overlay tells her how much battery and recording time she has left on Kim’s collar.

Knowing her cat well, Maria thinks Kim is hunting for something. She excitedly calls her coworker over to take a look. She taps the video, bringing up the overlay and long-presses the camera to start recording.

A red dot in the corner tells her that she is recording. Kim catches a bird! The whole office comes over to watch. The bird gets away. Maria taps the screen to bring up the overlay again and stops the recording.

A dialogue pops up with possible options. Maria has a YouTube channel just for her pets and chooses that option. After a recording the app returns to the camera/gallery view with the feed still running.

Maria puts her phone in her pocket, ending the feed. That was a good one!

Activity is the key screen. Let’s look at it in more detail.

Firstly, a daily picture captures your attention (you can choose how many photos each collar takes in the Menu/Settings area). These daily photos can be easily swiped through, saved and shared.

The name of the pet and status are clearly visible at all times, making sure that safety needs are met.

The camera icon is also handy, though I opted for it to stay locked in position so as not to obscure the insights below.

The idea I had for the charts were along the lines of what SnapChat does with their regularly changing filters. Keep the popular ones and A/B test new ones. Along with the daily pictures, this should make the app worth coming back to, even if you know your animals are safe. In terms of charts, I’m thinking of showing how your pet fare’s against others in their category/location.

Do you own the laziest Tonkinese in the Southern Hemisphere? Nope, but he is the 246nd out of 13,675 in our database! Pretty lazy!

Underneath is the activity feed. The most recent events are on top and you could theoretically scroll forever back to when you first got the collar.

Next to events such as left the house and slept for 3 hours would be an image (depending on preferences). If you have opted for less images, we just show an cute icon that represents the event type.

For those really wanting the details, this is where you go. You could also zoom into the various points of the map on the Location screen to get the same information in a popover.

High fidelity

A visual of your furry friend’s pet adventures.

I opted for a muted green and orange palette to give a little personality, direct the importance in the visual hierarchy but at the same time keep everything clean and utilitarian.

The map screen is a great way to get an idea of where your pet has been.

On load we get a centred map of recent activity, some controls and a peak above-the-fold of the most recent event, which doubles as the current status of the pet.

The video/warging button is prominent and has the highest visual hierarchy, always one tap away and above-the-fold.

Just a heads up before recording.

More on the map functionality below.

A quick modal before jumping into the live collar cam. Simple and easily dismissed.

As battery and recording time may be severely limited, even in the near future, I opted to have a modal that requires an interaction, rather than a 5 second load screen.

If usability testing proves it to be irritating and too much of an obstacle, it could be brought back a to a simple loading/ tap-to-see overlay.

The recording screen is very simple, with a Snapchat style tap for photos and hold for recording.

Signal and audio icons are easy to get to. This could be expanded to video-quality options, slow-mo, etc.

The main activity screen. Scroll left/right for your other pets.

The main activity screen starts with a gorgeous collar photo. (“Always take a photo when climbing is detected” being an app default).

The main picture I took myself. I had thought about adding some little furry feet to the bottom but decided it might be a waste of precious design time.

The little chart delighters are more fully realised with some sleep information and a culture-match tile. Imagine a Facebook quiz for your cat, but that uses our clever monitoring data to provide the answer with no effort on the user’s part.

The chart menu could allow users to say “More of this” “Less of this” to improve our offerings.

Additional charts may exist by scrolling to the left. However there might be a lack of affordance here, so I may need to redesign for that, allowing the third chart to peek out from the right.

The activity feed itself is a bit stock-photoey (I used Craft’s content manager to add some home/nature photos).

We can see a different example of some events. I created the icons myself in illustrator, following material design specs. Believe me, I googled “material icon cat” but didn’t find anything suitable. They could use more work, but hey, its a start. I’m particularly proud of the washing one.

We see the key information: location, activity-type, distance, time and duration of event.

A long-press could bring up the same more menu from the Maps screen.

In all I like where the app is going. My next steps would be to show a warning mode for the Activity and Location screens, to showcase what happens when the app thinks one of your pet’s are in danger or something abnormal has happened.

I’d also like to show what dogs and birds might look like and some animated gifs of the key interactions (I use a Sketch-Principle combo for that) to see scrolling and flicking between pets.

I also which I had had more time to create an Invision prototype of the main flows.

But it is time to move on to the next one!

Beyond MVP

So, I feel that I have captured most of the core functionality required in the time-frame that I gave myself. There is plenty more I would tweak, and some glaring errors I’d like to revise, but sometimes its better to deliver often and learn than get bogged down with refinement with zero user input.

IMHO, the ultimate, ultimate experience would be leave your dreary office or rumbling bus seat and awake in the wild surroundings of your furry friend in the most immersive experience possible. I felt like the GPS/Cam/Fitbit combo was pushing it, without adding a VR camera to the mix. But we can dream.

I would predict this is where the app would be going, if it could delight people early-on and cleverly manage the on-boarding of the supporting technology.

Perhaps in 2025 we might have a tiny 4k collar for an bird. Who knows, maybe the app could bring back the medieval sport of falconry…

Thanks so much for reading and please share your feedback, either on my process or on the app idea (or anything you like really).