Office Shenanigans: Swipe Right For Puppy
The first time Digitas Health partnered with an animal shelter to bring in an adoptable office puppy for the day I celebrated by creating a resume for our freelancing friend, hoping to land him a full time gig. So when the company announced they partnered with Street Tails to bring another adoptable puppy into the office a year later, I knew I needed to step up my game.
So I created a puppy dating app from scratch, custom-built to find exactly one perfect dog her perfect match.
In a perfect world, our heroic app developer would be an experienced graphic designer, enabling the creation of a visually stunning app that would captivate users, drawing them into a slick interface that reveals everything they needed to know about Pigwidgeon to inspire immediate adoption. Sadly, this was not a perfect world, so I created every screen of the app in PowerPoint before transferring the images into MSPaint where they were converted into PNG files.
Ideally, a skilled coder would take those assets and pull together a responsive app that works flawlessly across mobile, tablet, and web experiences to create the perfect experience for the perfect pup in search of a forever home. Practically, I loaded the PNG files into an app prototyping tool called InVision I had never touched before in my life, and built out simple transitions to create the illusion I knew what I was doing, as long as the prototype remained on one iPad in particular and never left portrait mode.
And yet, despite questionable graphic design skills and negligible coding expertise, Puppr was on full display when Pigwidgeon came to play at work, and multiple people took advantage of the prototype’s donation feature to send money to Street Tails as thanks for the afternoon of speed dating.
Minimum Viable Productivity
Puppr is not a pretty app. It’s not a very functional app, either. But it’s just enough to do a very particular job in a very particular circumstance. The app let you see a picture of Pigwidgeon being perfect, it let you know Street Tails was responsible for letting us know Pigwidgeon is perfect, and it provided guidance on how to thank Street Tails for sharing her perfection. And that was what was called for, in this case.
…especially since Puppr had one critical flaw I didn’t account for. The original plan was for the app to be on display in the same room as Pigwidgeon, for people patiently waiting for puppy playtime to peruse. And while there was a line of people waiting to play with Pidge…their attention was focused on her being perfect and adorable in every way, making app-based distractions next to impossible. While a few people poked around on the app (and even made a few donations to Street Tails through the QR code), the fuzzy center of attention was frolicking at our feet the whole time.
That’s a valuable lesson, right there. And that same challenge would have stymied far more sophisticated prototypes.
