Nutracker
What if there were no more poorly fed pets with digestive problems?
Scheduling, tracking &
assessing pet nutrition
Pet owners lack reliable resources for checking the quality of their pets' diet. Nutracker brings meal scheduling, food quality analysis, and access to nutritionists into one friendly app.
Pet owners lack reliable resources for checking the quality of their pets' diet.
Provide pet owners with a simple, reliable tool for scheduling, tracking and assessing their pets' nutrition.
Four stages, research to handoff
Interviews to
4 core pain points
I conducted online user interviews with 5 pet owners who cared about their pets' health and nutrition. Using the recordings, I built empathy maps, then distilled them into 4 pain points that shaped every design decision.
When more than one person cares for a pet, coordination breaks down: who followed the feeding schedule? Did someone give an extra treat?
Shifting meal times make nutrition harder to track and can cause digestive problems over time. Memory alone isn't enough.
Contradictory claims online make it nearly impossible to know whether a pet's diet is actually healthy or if the food brand is any good.
Pets with medical conditions need professional nutrition guidance, but qualified pet nutritionists are expensive and hard to access.
Three personas,
three design decisions
Each persona directly informed a specific feature, keeping design decisions grounded in real needs rather than assumptions.
Informed the Nutritionist Page, easy scheduling of consultations or on-the-go chat with a specialist.
Informed scheduled meals & "Who Fed" indicator, see who fed the pet, when, with zero back-and-forth.
Informed the Nutrition Analysis feature, see nutrient gaps and get breed-specific feeding recommendations.
Finding the
emotional valleys
Journey mapping revealed where users would experience frustration, and pushed the design to address those moments proactively, not just the happy path.
User flow, OOUX
& CTA inventory
Before touching screens, I needed to map the structure of the app. This stage taught me something valuable about when the "standard" process breaks down.
How the User Flow confused me, and how OOUX saved the project
The user flow felt logical at first, but the app's matrix structure meant user behavior wasn't sequential, it was too complex to trace linearly. Object-Oriented UX rescued the project: mapping objects and their relationships instead of tasks gave me the clarity I needed to understand what needed to exist in the app and how everything connected.
Paper to prototype,
tested twice
Two rounds of usability studies, first on the lo-fi prototype to shape the move to mockups, then on the hi-fi to catch what the first round missed.
What users told us
in two rounds
- 01 Couldn't find the button to add a new food item to the database. 3 / 5
- 02 Weren't sure the scheduled meal had been marked as fed after tapping. 75%
- 03 Tried to add a new food item from the homepage, not from the database. 4 / 5
- 01 Still confused after pressing "Mark as fed", needed stronger confirmation cues. 3 / 5
- 02 Unsure whether a just-added item was automatically selected in the menu. 75%
- 03 Choosing time and food amount took too long, users showed signs of annoyance. 3 / 5
Hi-fi prototype,
informed and organized
With study findings in hand, I built the hi-fi prototype. The visual design choices were informed by a mood board I created. The sticky sheet with the main components helped me keep the design system consistent from the start.
Built for
every user
- 1
High contrast for color blind and low-contrast users WCAG 1.4.3
All content meets the contrast ratio requirements ensuring readability for users with visual impairments or in bright environments.
- 2
Sequential navigation for assistive technology WCAG 2.4.3
Every page can be navigated sequentially with a screen reader. Hierarchy is consistent so assistive technology users experience the app in a logical, meaningful order.
- 3
Touch target sizing for all users WCAG 2.5.5
All tappable elements meet the minimum target size requirements, ensuring accurate interaction for users with motor impairments or on small screens.
What this project
taught me
Choose the Right Scope
As my first project, I tried to solve every problem at once. I now know that for any real product to succeed, scope is everything, even solving only one problem would have been enough to practice every aspect of UX design.
Recruit a Diverse Testing Group
I was lucky to find a fairly diverse group in terms of age and gender. Next time I'll push even harder, the more different people's perspectives you test with, the brighter the insights and the harder the blind spots are to hide.
Design Systems Save Lives
I learned it the hard way: next time, I'll build a proper design system from day one. Editing one component and watching it update throughout the entire document is worth every minute of setup time.
Let's work together
Reach out and I'll share more about how I can solve your problem!