UX Research Case study: Bangalore’s largest online community of animal lovers 🐾
The intent of this research is to observe how people interact within the online community, understand usage patterns and pain points, and identify relevant tools / features that could improve the overall experience of users in the community.
Introduction
Bombat Dawgz is a community of dog lovers in Bangalore, created in 2012 by renowned canine behaviour consultant, Sindhoor Pangal, with the aim of raising awareness on all dog related issues. This community strives to promote harmony between humans and animals and also largely focuses on improving the lives of native indie dogs.
🐶 Why Bombat Dawgz
‘Bengaluru emerged as the most pet-friendly city in India, followed by Mumbai, in a survey of over 1,500 pet owners across India.’
- If one were to keep track of the multiple initiatives taken by Bangaloreans to fight for animal rights, or event count the number of pet amenities in the city, it wouldn’t come as a surprise that Bangalore is the most pet friendly city in the country. The increase in the number of online dog lover communities over the years has definitely played a role in this.
- Bombat Dawgz is one of the largest community of dog lovers in the city with almost 25,000 members in their Facebook group. They have a presence on Instagram and Twitter as well.
- Being an animal lover myself, I found this to be the perfect opportunity for me to dive deeper into this community and connect with other dog lovers to understand their expectations and experiences in this group.
🐾 Secondary research
📷Screenshots to understand different use cases
- Adoption / foster related posts
2. People seeking advice / information regarding something specific — pet grooming, boarding, travelling, diet, etc)
3. Rescue / Actionable posts (including blood donations, asking for financial contributions etc)
4. General content related to animals (unactionable)
5. Other (volunteer opportunities / events, etc)
🔍 Observations from secondary research
- On an average, there are approximately 50 posts per day on this group.
- The most frequent posts on this group are adoption / rescue related.
- The community is generally very friendly and helpful, however sometimes disagreements do crop up between users with different opinions.
- Observations on existing tabs -
🐾 Primary Research
Two separate surveys were created — one for users and one for admins; in order to understand the pain points from both perspectives.
🔍 User Survey
After having taken permission from the admin, I put up a post on the group requesting people to fill in the survey form, and also personally reached out to a few active members of the community via DM.
I realized that the best way to break the ice with users from this community would be to talk to them about the one thing they love most - dogs! This in turn helped them gain trust in me and made them realize that the findings from this research could benefit the community and ultimately benefit dogs.
🔍 Insights from User Survey
(collated from over 60 responses)
- The Bombat Dawgz community is continuously growing, however, a large number of people have been a part of the community since the initial years of its formation.
2. The most frequent posts on this group are related to adoptions, rescues and of people seeking advice, information on specific things
3. Most users have joined this community to stay connected with like-minded animal lovers
4. Majority of users wish to consume educational / informative content from the admins who are canine behaviour consultants.
5. Users currently find it difficult to go back and look for specific kinds of posts, which gives rise to similar questions being asked multiple times.
6. Majority of the users feel that a lot of the questions being asked are repetitive and suggested that there should be a way to easily access frequently asked questions.
7. Due to the high volume of posts everyday, some people feel that they tend to miss out on some of the important posts and updates.
🔍 User Interview
Towards the end of the survey, people were asked whether they would be comfortable getting on a call to share more about their experience. Contact details were collected only from those who consented to this. Out of the 65 survey responses, around 28 people shared their contact details, from which I further selected a subset of users based on :
- how active they are in the community
- what kind of posts they put up
- how long they’ve been a part of the community
This was evaluated by looking at their survey responses and by doing a quick search of their name within the Facebook group. Based on this, I was able to select a set of 7 diverse people in order to get different perspectives.
🔍 Insights from User Interviews
(collated from 7 interviews)
💡 People feel comfortable asking for pet related advice on this platform due to the large number of experienced dog lovers and rescuers in this community, however there is also a fair amount of hate speech and bullying that takes place on certain kinds of posts (posts about mating / breeding etc) which discourages some people from engaging with posts.
💡 People feel that important posts are getting lost amidst all the activity in the group.
💡 Majority of the users are unaware that there is an existing database of information under the ‘Files’ tab.
💡 People who report cases of injured / mistreated dogs do not know which rescuer / volunteer to contact directly, which leads to some amount of delay in action being taken.
💡 There is currently no way to keep track of the unsuccessful adoptions / rescues. Posts and data are unorganized and scattered.
💡 Most people said that they would like the admins to be more active in sharing educational content and would like to interact more with them.
💡 People also suggested that they would like to have a common fund monitored by admins / volunteers to collect some nominal amount from each user every month. This could then be used to help with the rescue cases and would be easier than donating to different rescuers / shelters individually.
🔍 Admin Survey
I connected with the creator of this group, Sindhoor, who upon understanding the intent of this research, filled in the survey and also circulated the form with the other two admins of the group.
🔍 Insights from Admin Survey
(There are 3 admins in this community)
- Main goal of admins is to raise awareness on dog related issues.
2. Admins mostly put up informative posts or posts related to some announcement or update.
3. Admins have a rule book or an SOP, on the basis of which they decide what action is to be taken against a user who violates community guidelines.
4. There is currently no system in place to help admins keep track of people who have been given warnings or have posted offensive content in the past.
🔍 Admin Interview
In addition to questions regarding overall functioning and management of the community, I also discussed with the admins some of the inputs / suggestions that I received from the users.
🔍 Insights from Admin Interview
💡 Admins feel that most of the educational / informative posts put up by them does not reach enough users (possibly due to lack of engagement on such posts).
💡 Like users, admins too feel that important posts are getting less attention, and that categorisation and easy filtering of posts would help.
💡 Admins are unable to monitor and control the toxic comments due to high volume of posts
💡 Admins feel that crowd funding would not be practical as there would be various complications involved in the implementation of something like this, and also because there are already various other organisations doing this.
💡 Admins are open to having interactive sessions / Q&As with community members to raise more awareness, however, there might be some challenges which would need to be addressed.
🐾 User Personas & User Journey Mapping
Persona 1:
Persona 2:
Persona 3:
🐾 Ideas and Opportunities
Conclusion
Though this community has been functioning well on Facebook over the last 9 years, the user experience can be elevated by introducing certain essential features such as categorisation and easy monitoring of posts, voice channels, etc. One way to achieve this would be to shift the community from Facebook to Discord.
Implementation
Once my research process was documented, I shared the file with the admins, and was glad to know that my research findings and solutions were received positively. Following my discussion with them, I am hopeful that we will be able to work towards implementation of the same.
Learnings from conducting the research
Personal learnings from the research process:
- Understood the importance of networking and communication, and how to strike up a conversation with a stranger on the internet!
- Importance of understanding the problem statement before jumping into solutions
- Learnt that it’s important not to have any assumptions / preconceived notions before starting out with the research process
- Learnt how to empathise with users and understand their pain points
- Realised that it is always better to collect all the data first, and only then take a call on what is relevant and what isn’t. At the time of creating the survey, I felt that questions pertaining to age and gender were irrelevant to my study and hence did not include them in the survey. However, I later realised that those are important aspects that I should have documented, irrespective of whether it had any direct implication to my research.
The aim is not to find an out-of-the-box solution, but to find a solution that works
This was a research project done for an assignment at 10kdesigners over a period of 9 days.
Do reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn for any feedback, discussions or collaborations. Would love to connect!
