THE PROJECT

Every year Cooper, a user experience design and strategy firm, holds an intensive 4-day UX workshop in which attendees develop and pitch a design solution for an organization. Using Goal-Directed Design principles, and working with the non-profit organization, Canine Companions (CCI), we were tasked with developing a tablet application for veterans with short-term memory loss (applicants & graduates) that helped them successfully incorporate a service dog into their lives. CCI receives hundreds of applications, but often candidates don't have sufficient training to immediately take in a service dog. To overcome this challenge, our team:

• Conducted stakeholder research - interviewing a veteran and service dog owner and company constituents.
• Developed a persona and scenario - our persona, Frank Loft, is a 26 year old veteran eager to integrate a service dog into his life. Frank has been practicing dog commands and decides to shares his progress.
• Created a design framework - the design solution illustrated our vision for an application that simply communicated the user's progress, showing lessons and tests completed, used a rewards system for encouragement, and incorporated sharing functionality.
• Pitch! - we then pitched our idea to the Canine Companions team.