Category: UI/UX DESIGNER

Project Overview

Pet owners struggle to find trustworthy, specialized veterinary care providers and often lack adequate support during post-medical recovery. To address this gap in the pet care ecosystem, we created Vetted: a comprehensive platform that connects pet owners with certified veterinary care providers for trusted, specialized care through a seamless and secure platform, enhancing post-medical support and general pet care services.

Key Impacts:

• Built trust in the veterinary marketplace through verified professionals

• Created a dedicated platform connecting pet owners with specialized care

• Simplified post-care discovery with an intuitive, feature-rich solution

• Opened new revenue and marketing opportunities for veterinarians

• Fostered accountability with two-way ratings for owners and providers

Introduction / Background

This was a greenfield design project that I joined through Generate, Northeastern’s student-led product development studio, as a designer on Vetted’s client team. I was assigned to the project in its earliest stages of development, when the team had only secured a domain name and created a basic logo. The concept for Vetted stemmed from a clear gap in the pet care ecosystem: the difficulty of locating trusted, specialized providers and ensuring continuity of care.

I was a supporting lead designer and researcher in transforming how pet owners connect to specialized veterinary care. The design challenge was broad, crafting an end-to-end experience that enabled pet owners to confidently discover, evaluate, and connect with specialized veterinary providers, while ensuring that follow-up care and guidance were an integral part of the user journey.

Overarching Problem / Opportunity

Pet owners face significant challenges when seeking qualified care providers for pets with special needs. After veterinary visits or procedures, pet owners often struggle to find certified providers who can properly administer medications, provide specialized boarding, and offer ongoing care support. Traditional pet care services lack transparency about provider qualifications and expertise, leaving pet owners uncertain about whether their pets will receive appropriate specialized care when they need it most. Simultaneously, veterinary care providers lack dedicated platforms to market their specialized services and connect with pet owners who need their specific expertise, limiting their ability to reach clients beyond traditional referral networks.

Final Solution

We created Vetted - a comprehensive platform that connects pet owners with certified veterinary care providers for trusted, specialized care through a seamless and secure platform, enhancing post-medical support and general pet care services. Vetted addresses this challenge by creating a centralized hub where pet owners can access certified veterinary professionals who provide tailored guidance and long-term care.

1. Secure & Trustworthy Platform

   1. A comprehensive authentication and security system that verifies veterinary care provider credentials through API-driven validation, ensuring pet owners connect only with certified professionals while maintaining the highest standards of data privacy for sensitive health information.

2. Professional Marketplace for Care Providers

   1. A dedicated platform enabling veterinary professionals to showcase their specialized credentials through verified profiles, manage their service offerings and availability, and connect directly with pet owners actively seeking their expertise. This creates new client acquisition channels beyond traditional referral networks, allowing providers to market specialized services like post-operative care, medication management, and chronic condition monitoring to pet owners who need them most.

3. Seamless Care Coordination Platform

   1. An intuitive personalized dashboard for the following groups: pet owners (appointments and pet tracking), providers (profiles, bookings, and client communication), and veterinary care teams (service management). Features included geospatial search, booking and payments, and integrated messaging for smooth coordination. This centralized platform simplifies care management by giving each user type the tools they need in one place, reducing friction in booking and coordinating specialized veterinary services.

4. Multi-User Communication System

   1. Role-specific messaging and booking tools that streamline communication between pet owners and providers. Pet owners can book and track care, while providers manage appointments and deliver specialized services. This is all done through different UI dashboards - one for pet owners and the other for providers. This prevents miscommunication between parties and enables quicker appointment booking by providing clear, role-appropriate interfaces for each user type's needs.

Research

Research Methods

Our goal was to understand the current pet care landscape to identify challenges with these existing platforms and areas for growth opportunities. As a student-led project with a one-semester timeline, we focused on research methods that could quickly validate the platform concept and inform design decisions without requiring extensive external user recruitment.

1. Stakeholder Interviews

   1. To understand our clients' vision, business goals, and target user needs, establish a foundation for the platform's core features and ensure alignment throughout the design process.

2. Competitive Analysis of Pet Care Platforms

   1. To identify gaps in how pet owners currently find and connect with providers, with emphasis on specialized and post-care needs.

3. Information Architecture

   1. To map the site structure and navigation, ensuring clear entry points for both pet owners and providers in the two-sided marketplace.

4. User Flow Documentation 

   1. To define and optimize critical user paths (login, search, booking, profile management), enabling seamless interactions across multiple user types.

5. Moodboard Research

   1. To establish visual direction and design principles by analyzing successful healthcare and service marketplaces, ensuring the platform conveyed trust, professionalism, and warmth.

Research Insights and Definition

We discovered the following:

• Existing platforms lack post-care support

  • Current platforms help with finding veterinarians or booking visits but provide little support for recovery, medication, or chronic conditions, leaving owners without guidance during critical periods.

• Trust and credential verification are major pain points

  • Pet owners struggle to confirm provider expertise. Limited credential verification creates uncertainty around specialized and complex care.

• Multi-user coordination adds complexity

  • Veterinary care involves multiple stakeholders (owners, providers, and multiple pets), yet platforms treat this as a simple two-way interaction. Testing within the design and engineering team showed the need for distinct workflows for each role.

• Geographic access to care is uneven

  • Specialized veterinary care varies widely by location. Geospatial search and filtering were essential to help owners find appropriate care within a reasonable distance.

Research Analysis Tools

• User Flows

  • To turn research insights into testable concepts. Low-fidelity wireframes validated user journeys for different user types before high-fidelity design, enabling quick iteration based on engineering feedback and user testing.

Design

Design Ideation

Our ideation process was driven by finding ways to design for two distinct user types (pet owners and providers) with fundamentally different needs and mental models. We used collaborative sketching sessions and component iteration to explore different approaches to the dual-sided marketplace problem.

We prioritized solutions based on:

1. User workflow efficiency - Solutions that reduced cognitive load for providers managing multiple bookings

2. Information hierarchy - Designs that presented the most critical information (pending bookings, patient alerts) prominently

3. Component scalability - Approaches that could adapt our existing brand guidelines across both user types while maintaining consistency

4. Technical feasibility - Solutions that aligned with our engineering team's capabilities and timeline constraints

From the design ideas that we ideated and prioritized, we created a site map to establish the information architecture for Vetted's two-sided marketplace. The site map organized core user journeys. Pet owners could navigate from the homepage to search, view provider profiles, and book services, while providers accessed their dashboard to manage bookings, update credentials, and communicate with clients. This structural foundation ensured both user types had clear, intuitive pathways tailored to their distinct needs.

We then translated the site map into low-fidelity wireframes to visualize key interactions and validate our navigation decisions before moving into high-fidelity design. These wireframes allowed us to test critical flows, such as the booking process and dashboard layouts, with both our engineering team and stakeholders, enabling early feedback and iteration.

Design Iterations

We did stakeholder collaboration throughout the design iteration process to align design decisions with technical feasibility and business goals. Regular check-ins with engineers and the client ensured solutions addressed user needs while staying within project constraints.

Key Design Challenges and Solutions:

Dual-User Perspective Confusion

The team initially struggled with how to design for pet owners and veterinary care providers with similar visual language but different actions depending on the user type. For example, we had to resolve open questions like whether providers should automatically accept requests or have manual approval controls. We needed to clarify the difference and understand what is best suited for each user type's workflow.

Information Architecture Clarity

We faced confusion about page hierarchy and navigation—specifically, whether the "Careboard" (the communication hub for exchanging booking updates, care notes, and messages) should be a standalone section or integrated into dashboards. Through stakeholder feedback and user flow testing, we determined it should be accessible from the dashboard to maintain context around active bookings. This required multiple iterations to establish a clear information architecture that balanced ongoing care coordination with streamlined navigation.

Provider Interface Complexity

As the designer responsible for the provider dashboard, I faced the challenge of displaying comprehensive booking information, patient details, scheduling controls, and communication tools without overwhelming the interface. Providers needed quick access to patient history, booking status, and action items, but I needed to do so clearly and with visual balance.

Design Solution

This led to Vetted - a comprehensive platform that connects pet owners with certified veterinary care providers for trusted, specialized care through a seamless and secure platform, enhancing post-medical support and general pet care services. The dashboards prioritize pending action, provide clear visual differentiation between booking management and messaging, and utilize familiar component patterns adapted for professional healthcare workflows. 

Evaluation/Testing

We tested Vetted for its success and opportunities for improvements. We did so with the following methods:

Community Design Critiques

• Why: Used Generate's monthly Crits for fresh perspectives on marketplace design from members across different teams and projects.

• Insight: External reviewers from other Generate teams flagged unclear navigation and cluttered provider dashboards.

• Action: Therefore, we simplified layouts and refined navigation labels.

Figma Prototype Feedback

• Why: Gathered async feedback through Figma comments for detailed, contextual input from our engineering team during backend development.

• Insight: The software engineering team had confusion with certain Figma prototype flows, indicating UI inconsistencies and unclear booking flow logic that the design team needed to address.

• Action: From there, we standardized components and streamlined booking steps to resolve the disconnect between design and implementation.

Public Showcase Validation

• Why: Presented at Generate's semester-end showcase to a diverse audience, including Generate members, Northeastern students, our clients, industry professionals (professors, alumni, Sherman Center members), and other teams' clients. Following the presentations, all prototypes across Generate disciplines were displayed for attendees to interact with and test.

• Insight: There was strong interest in specialized care access, but onboarding felt too long.

• Action: We reduced the number of required fields during initial sign-up and moved non-essential information (like detailed pet medical history) to be collected later in the user journey.

If we had more time, we would do the following:

User Interviews with Pet Owners using Vetted
Conduct 8–10 interviews with pet owners experienced in specialized or post-op care. Measured ease of booking services and comfort levels when sharing sensitive health information.

Usability Testing

Test the provider dashboard with 5–6 veterinary professionals to evaluate task completion success. Track completion times for key actions—such as reviewing history, approving bookings, and coordinating care, while noting any errors or points of abandonment.

A/B Testing for evaluating Conversion from Profile views to Bookings
Compare different booking flows, credential displays, and messaging interfaces. Measure conversion from profile views to bookings and completion rates across the full booking cycle.

Reflection

Impact

Client Satisfaction: Our clients expressed strong appreciation for the final product, sending personal messages acknowledging the quality and thoroughness of our work. The comprehensive design system and multi-user interface approach exceeded their expectations for addressing the complex veterinary care coordination challenge.

Provider Empowerment: Created a dedicated channel for veterinary care providers to market specialized services and access clients seeking post-operative and specialized care, opening revenue streams previously limited to referral networks.

Team Excellence: All Vetted team members demonstrated pride in their contributions and were eager to showcase the platform at the semester-end presentation. The collaborative design process strengthened cross-functional relationships between design and engineering teams, establishing effective feedback loops for future projects.

Community Validation: Community members at the showcase were impressed with our solution to the dual-sided marketplace challenge, particularly our approach to handling credential verification and the distinct user experiences for pet owners versus veterinary care providers.

Design System Impact: Successfully created a scalable component library and brand identity that can support future platform expansion, demonstrating how healthcare-focused design patterns can maintain both professionalism and approachability.

Personal Reflection

Designing a pet care marketplace revealed the challenge of serving both pet owners and providers, each with distinct needs for booking, tracking, and communication.

Working on a design team reshaped how I approach projects. Shared ownership, component libraries, and clear communication taught me the value of systematic design and collaboration.

Partnering with engineers emphasized balancing usability with feasibility. I learned that strong design emerges from negotiating user needs, team workflows, and technical constraints.