Customer Pathways
Premium Pet Food Company
As a freelance User Experience Designer for Haberman Inc., I collaborated with strategists and creatives on a project for their client: a premium pet food company. I helped uncover moments of anxiety or confusion within the journey of a pet owner; classified these different types of experiences; and then ideated on how to increase brand awareness within each group. Lastly, I created a series of documents to communicate these findings to Haberman's client.
Initial Investigation and Ideation
Prior to meeting with the team at Haberman, I read through a number of research reports that had been produced for the client over the past few years. These ranged from web surveys, interviews with pet owners, and interviews with pet-food experts.
Once I was familiar with the research, I sat down with designers and strategists at Haberman to map out the key pain-points of a dog owner. The white-board below shows potential pathways of the client's customers. Special attention was given to times of uncertainty or high-stress in the journey of the customers. Additional call-outs included intersections between multiple pathways (and the business touch-points associated with them); consequences of these pain-points; and any insights into the culture of different types of customers.
Visual Communication Tools
After collaborating to create a rough outline of the customer pathways, I was tasked to refine our ideas and create a series of documents to communicate them to the client.
Using Sketch.app, I created a hero document (shown below). This outlines specific types of customers with unique pain-points relating to their dog. The categories are owners with dogs who have food allergies; owners with dogs who are picky eaters; owners who have just adopted a new dog; and owners who are trying to find ways to improve the health of their dog. This document also details the impetus for each type of owner; cultural insights and considerations; and key influencers and information sources.
Next, I created a document (shown below) that explained the business implications of the customer pain-points communicated in the hero document. This companion slide showed where there was potential to increase brand awareness and how the client could communicate effectively to dog owners considering a new pet food brand.
This series of documents was the product of weeks of iteration and collaboration. The goal was to show to the client the confluence of User Experience, Customer Experience, and Marketing. My final deliverables echoed these intersections.
