Petiu: A pet farewell service system

Design Methods

How is the current pet funeral worldwide?

We searched for companies that provide pet funeral service worldwide and found out they generally reflect funeral of human on pets, with the process of dressing up body, ritual ceremony, cremation and preserve cremains. They provide various memorial products for people to remember their pets.
Although most people in China do not have religions, they tend to held the Buddhist funeral for their pets, indicating a special attitude to pets' funeral.

Overall, we found the current pet funeral is almost a copy of human's. They simply use memorable products to ease the pain of losing a pet and only few of them provide mental health guidance.

User Research

Survey

We first conducted online survey about the attitue towards pet funeral. The questions were different for people who have/once-had pets and people who have never had pets. The results showed a supportive attitude to hold funeral to pets. The biggest finding was people's expectation for pet funeral was different from that of human being.

The online survey recieved 136 valid answers, of which 64% have or once had pets. Most of them are females and in their mid-20s.

Findings from survey

· Not satisfied with current pet funeral service is the main reason tha some people refuse pet funeral.
· People tend to express their negative feelings about losing pets with those who share similar experiences.
· Memento product of pets is not a must for people.

Interview & Design Points

Then, we interviewed four participants who had once lost their pets and asked them their feelings and methods to go out of the grief. We analysed their pain points and did another interview to figure out their ideal situation for pet funeral. At last we came up with three design points to guide our following design.

Prototype

Role Play

We printed our first draft of service flow. A small model of the service scene was made to assist the explanation. In prototype process, we invited four people to go through the service flow and asked them to give us feedback.

Wireframe

We created the wireframes and an information architecture for usability test. The four participants were asked to do card-sorting in order for us to better categorise functions. They also completed tasks with the interactive wireframes. Modifications were made according to the user test.

Solution

After user test and validation, the service was modified and the main touch pionts are shown below.

The service blueprint is shown below. There are three main use scenarios: home, garden and mourning hall.

System map

The map on the right shows the detailed service and labours invloved in Petiu. It explains how finance, material and information exchange among these points.

Touch points

The map on the left explain how each touch point of the service works in different stages. You can see different lines of current customers, previous customers and potential future customers in the map, showing a unique selling point of Petiu which is linking people who share the similar experience of losing their pets together to comfort each other.

Touch point map