Designing for disappointment

I'm really excited to be here to chat with you all about the topic of designing for disappointment. There's a little bit of a, you know, roller coaster in here, but I will definitely promise lots of pet photos for all the pet lovers in the room. I'd like to start this off with introducing you to sweet Olive. Sweet Olive, timid, shy, but the bravest girl, found herself at a rescue organization called Aussie Hearts for Paws Rescue.

This organization is part of the pet rescue membership cohort, who then listed this sweet girl, Olive, onto the Pet Rescue pet adoption platform with the hopes of finding her a loving home. And along came Bronte. This is a beautiful story of one day where Bronte had decided that instead of the typical filter that she'd usually be browsing through, which would be the small dogs category, on this day, she clicked on medium dogs. And when she came across Olive, she immediately fell in love. And now they're happily ever after, and it is ultimately the best outcome possible.

And this is for pet rescue, what we call a happy tail. And we're particularly good at this particular part of it. We are really good at being able to connect, rescue pets. So pets displaced in need of loving homes with millions, putting them in front of millions of potential adopters every year. We're so good at it that this year, we reached an incredible milestone of 1,000,000 pets adopted for real.

Thank you. We're really yeah. We're really so chuffed about this milestone, but it also indicates how much work there is left to done be to be done. Pet rescue is a charity like no other. We love tech for good. We love tech for good. We love to innovate and disrupt archaic systems such as the animal welfare, animal welfare system, which I won't go too deeply into today.

But we love to really challenge the status quo and kick down some of those doors. We're most known for operating pet res petrescue.com.au, but this is Australia's largest and most successful and most trusted pet adoption platform. And we have Australia's most visited charity website. It's pretty cool. Fun fact, today is actually the anniversary of two decades ago when Pet Rescue first launched as a website.

Yeah. Milestones. So if you can imagine, also that was the same time, same year as Facebook, now Meta, launched. You can envisage that during those times, I'll holler back to my my folks who are back there in the web during those times, it was a very different space. Social networking was just beginning. Technology was absolutely in its infancy, but the possibilities were in abundance.

And it was an exciting time. And it was a really strange time in the animal welfare sector all in one. So there a lot different tensions and opportunities in the context that existed there. Back in those days, rescue pets, had a different brand. They were perceived as broken, damaged, unwanted somewhat.

And fast forward to today, we've been we've worked with two over 2,200 rescue organizations across Australia to help change that perception and bring them into the popular and mainstream way of acquiring a pet into your life. So there's a lot of, yeah, a lot of good stuff to celebrate in this. Sorry. I'm going to fast forward, but also rewind and I'll get me in my little VCR remote.

Thank you to the one person who laughed at my my generational reference here. Okay. So I I want to place us at 2018, which is a really important year as part of pet rescue's evolution and our journey. The goal, the mission itself was really simple, find a home for every pet that needed one.

So we would do this firearm online platform, which would reach, at that point in time, around 4,000,000 visitors a year. And we would also build these partnerships with these corporate amazing sponsors, these big brands out in the world to raise awareness about rescue pets, the importance of pet adoption and what kind of difference that's going to make, running the awareness campaigns, pet adoption events, getting all of this exposure and actively increasing popularity of pets, rescue pets in Australia. But, there's a but.

During this time, we have the big hairball. There was a lot of love and a lot of really positive feelings about rescue pets out there. And that was really good thing to have established after fifteen years of the organization running. But at this juncture, we had embarked on something that was a game changing initiative for us.

We partnered with a huge household corporate brand, who I won't name because of NDAs. But they, they got on board and we had this idea of let's do this huge adoption event that they would pay for every single one of their thousands of employees for the adoption fees for everyone who adopted during this campaign.

To us, the difference that this would make, there was 9,000 pets needing homes across Australia at that point. That could have been the campaign of that decade in zeroing out the shelters, zeroing out the rescue and opening up rescue capacity. The hairball is that this event failed. Instead of zeroing out the shelters and getting every single pet adopted, we ended up with thousands of really disheartened, disappointed people who wanted to participate, who wanted to help, and they weren't successful in adoptions.

It led to this corporate sponsor really questioning whether they would even support rescue pets into the future. The executives, the board of directors, they were pretty cross about this event causing a negative sentiment. Clicker. Okay. Sorry. It was a devastating moment, but it was very enlightening all at the same time for us.

On my hand, we're questioning how our marketing strategies worked. Like, you know, did we arrive in increasing interest in rescue pets? That's what we wanted to do to be able to find a home for every pet. Yet the math wasn't mathing at this point. The pet homelessness issue hadn't disappeared. The shelters were still completely full. It wasn't solved. So what the actual heck in heck?

And this was a rig you know, I I talked to you about this being an evolutionary moment for us. We were so focused on generating interest and demand and desirability for rescue pets, and that needed to happen. But at this point, the opportunity that we had missed, or rather the problem plus the opportunity that we hadn't even had any any visibility or sight of because we hadn't actually put on that thread was that popular pets could receive anywhere between 50 to a 150 inquiries. Yet, dramatic effect, a pet could only go to one home.

I'm pausing here because logically in this room when we have this hindsight moment, that makes sense. It's a pattern not dissimilar to rentals market or even dating. The pattern is sound. We see it everywhere. But it was never a problem that a small animal welfare charity ever imagined we'd get to that point of.

I mean, talk about that one zero one of charity organizations. It's raise awareness, raise awareness, raise awareness, get people into action, and we did that thing. Sorry. Going back to Olive's case, she was adopted recently, but if this was the year 2018, she would have easily received a 100 inquiries. Sorry, the one inquirer who was Bronte, who was the lucky one that got to adopt and have Olive in her life as her companion and best friend.

The other 99 folks, what would we need to do? This is a question. What would we need to do for all of these disappointed people who weren't successful? And the question itself runs deeper and it uncovered a lot more because up to the point of the inquiry, the process was quite similar. It was quite identical whether someone was successful or unsuccessful.

So thinking about this in the patterns of the work that you all are working on, they all started from a single place, imagining or wanting or having that desire to have a pet in their life. And then the journey goes. Everyone goes through this. They're searching, discovering, deciding, and then the actual action. So these are the, you know, these are those moments where they absolutely were so invested in the same way just as Bronte was.

They imagined Olive as part of their lives, as part of their routines, as part of their every day and their adventures. They likely discussed, deliberated, probably negotiated, probably butt heads a little bit with housemates, with partners, with family members. And by the time that they'd had made this decision and made their mind up to take the action to apply, they were likely feeling that emotion that whole emotional journey as well.

And the only difference was that Bronte was the one that was able to have the successful outcome. So I won't read this out because you're all UXers and you and you you know the rules of UX, but this one was, one of these moments in complete play. And the deeper piece of what I'm talking about here is beyond that surface level of, you know, that transactional moment.

This is a personal identity piece. Every single person who went through this journey had investment. They were invested. They had imagined themselves not only adopting, they were imagining themselves as a type of person who values doing good, who values participating in charitable causes, the type of person who would adopt a pet. And that is huge when you're thinking about it from a values based perspective, the identity piece.

And there were these notions of helping the attachment that someone would form by actually going through this journey, and that pride in the personal investment. And sorry, the pleaser in me is absolutely aching because ninety nine people, for every pet that's adopted on pet rescue, if ninety nine people are having the worst time of their lives, yeah, I'm screaming internally about that.

So thinking about what we've learned at pet rescue from this moment was that also once someone had decided to adopt a pet or to have a pet in their lives, that desire doesn't disappear. That lives on and continues on from that as a thought seed. And if they're having multiple bad experiences, the entirety of that that experience and and not hearing back or, you know, not being able to have that outcome that they were looking for, they'll simply go to an alternative method.

So I'll talk just briefly a little bit more about that. But to add to that for us, one of the signals was very much our help desk, which is, run by one person, part time, three days a week, not even. So at in in that year, 2018, 50% of our inbound inquiries that we have received was a complaint to do with not having heard back from the rescue group.

It's a pretty humongous stat. But beyond that, the reactions themselves, the sentiment was so viscerally strong. For some, they were even experiencing a form of grief, mourning, the thought of what could have been, and deeply sad and feeling wounded and needing healing. For others, they were feeling personally attacked, unfairly judged, deemed unworthy, and their reaction was anger.

So we have these huge extremes of emotions alongside the joy of happy tales. We're just you know, it was one of those moments where we went, well, what was the fallout? And here's where adopting a pet is so different to any other ecommerce model. There wasn't a plug and play. Hey. Here's a UX journey that we can just chuck on in there. It was so emotionally driven and so unique.

The applicant merely not obtain a product. They were told that their offer to help and their home wasn't good enough. And this categorically became another set of emotional injury, and it fueled the next decision. The consequences of this for vulnerable pets is the difference sometimes between life and death. It's an estimated 100,000 healthy rehomable pets that are killed in Australia every day.

But I won't go into that too much. So, here we had inadvertently lived out the cobra effect. Given that our goal was to find a home for every pet that needed one, our solution, and the way that the whole sector was responding to overarching pressure of the demand for rescue pets was inevitably making the problem worse.

Perfectly good homes were again, I'm going back to that. They'd already made the decision to bring a pet into their lives the next version of this was that they were essentially turning to easier methods. And easier methods could look like unethical methods that keep backyard breeding alive, that could essentially create more population and a lack of visibility, that keeps pets at risk and harmful in general for the whole sector, everyone involved.

So to, I suppose, hone in on this point, it was no longer a choice to adopt. That choice had already been made. It was now the next decision was the choice was taken out of the hands of that person who was the adopter. All right. Sorry. That's very bad news at that point for the sector. But we have to also look at the two sides of the coin here. On the other side of the inbox, to understand the issue, we have to understand the whole picture and all of the people and the actors involved as part of this.

On the other end of these hundreds of inquiries were usually one volunteer, maybe two. And they were usually doing multiple jobs and still are, wearing multiple hats, sometimes responding to these emails late at night or in between things that they were doing. They weren't on their phone constantly or the context was completely different.

They weren't in front of a laptop. And so knowing this, their whole goal was to have inquiries come through, find a home for that pet, go through the adoption process. And then once the pet is adopted, their next priority is the other pets in their care, and being able to save the next ones who then needed the help afterwards.

Again, the 100,000. They were dealing with life and death moments, not a customer experiencing journey. It wasn't their top priority, naturally. And this was a new slide that I added just before I hopped on stage. But beyond this, the context that matters it was inspired by a talk earlier, if you're in the room. But the context really matters, that these frontline folks are not in front of their screens.

Last week, when I went to pick up this gorgeous boy for foster care, The foster care coordinator was running around. They didn't have their phone out. They were trying to handle him, essentially, try to get me set up with all the food and all the meds that I needed to be able to get him set up for success.

They had a walkie talkie, so that was going off. In the meanwhile, There was a person that poked their head around another volunteer and asked her something about another case. There was distractions galore. So she wasn't necessarily thinking about what was going to happen to anyone who wasn't successful to adopt his pet. She was just going, this is the pet.

I've just realized that I'm really speaking really fast, but I'm very passionate about this topic. So I wanted to just hold this thought here. There were two perspectives. There was two different voices. And there were challenges from both. There was potential adopters not having heard back from the rescue community, but had no idea. You know, it was radio stations.

Had no idea what was going on. And on the other side, the rescue community were receiving an abundance of inquiries and, interest that they weren't actually resourced to be able to handle. For them, there was the stressor of more inquiries coming in, and not being able to actually reply back to everyone. So this was stressful on all parties involved.

Adding to that the abuse that would actually come through because people are so passionate and feeling those big emotions, that was also a fallout from this. Heaps of tension there. And in this, there was opportunities when we stopped to think and to listen and to understand whether the interventions that we were making, were they helpful or were they hindering?

And what could we do to actually make the experience smoother for everyone, while also acknowledging that there are the pressures of not just simply going, oh, you just simply need a team and to resource that out. It was about how do we help rescues as a community of 80% of them are volunteer run. How do we support them through the nuances of the pressures that they're feeling, and at the same time address the lack of transparency from the inquirer side and not leading to alternative means?

Okay. So at the center of it all, it was a common goal. We just want to help pets. We can do this. Okay? So here's the project. I'm going to run through it really quickly because we've got we had three goals as part of the project that we embarked on in 2018. It was about managing the expectations of potential adopters, creating a safe and positive space for all, and reducing workload for overstretched rescues. Three pretty simple goals.

And so we hold those at the center or held those at the center of as we were building out the solutions, on what it actually looked like for an adopter, an inquirer, and someone who's interested as being a potential adopter, right through to the rescue community. Our preface is that we didn't embark on huge research.

We just didn't have that kind of resource. But we simply sat, listened, observed as much as we could to build out this potential version of what could be better. So we went from this, Noting small charity organisation did the best we could in the context that we did. Rescue group lists pet online. A doctor searches website.

Then, click. A doctor fills out the online inquiry form. Inquiry form goes to the rescue group as an email. They receive the email, and then the successful adopter is notified. That was the process. So we went from this to something a little bit more deliberate. We didn't go back in time, but we're going to just patiently slide through this. Cool.

Cool. Cool. To this. That worked. Okay. Sorry. Same starting point. Rescue group lists the pet on pet rescue. Then we add in this moment where the rescues can select their adoption policy level, and they can self elect that. It becomes an ability for the rescue to be able to communicate what is expected as part of their requirements and what is their application process. It's unique for every single rescue organization.

There is no standardized framework for this. The adopter then searches for their pet on pet rescue. So that's the usual. But they also now have the adoption policy info available so that they've got we're managing expectations. We understand more of what's involved there. The adopter fills out the online inquiry form, but instead of this just shooting through an email and having no trail, an account and a login is created.

From there, we'll just a little boop off here. The adopter receives an automated response. I know it's so simple, but they just receive an automated response. It's been received. Here's what to expect in information. And we also calculated out the typical response time for that particular rescue organization of how long it might take for, this person to wait to hear back.

Little, little simple stuff. And then from that account that was created, a two way conversation, a la a messaging piece, was created. And then this created that safety layer for conversations to be able to have that chance of that piece of reporting any unsafe or abusive behaviors. So that mechanism became in place.

Then it goes through into the rescue organization receives the inquiry info. And in that, they've got their conversations manager and tooling that's out of an inbox and out of spreadsheets. They can log in, review, shortlist, and then do the same thing, which is select the successful adopter and commence the adoption process, and also baking in an email, a bulk email, that can also automatically notify the unsuccessful adopters of the outcome, triggered as a bulk action on status change, with permission of the rescue organisation.

But this could save that 99 amount of emails to say you weren't successful. Stay on the journey. We might have other pets. This part was automated, and it was also editable by the rescue organisation. Quickly touching on this, for us, it was really inspired by the times. And that context matters, as we're designing solutions out to match it up to expectations of what people are expecting within the realms of tech and the way that they were using the tools at the time. This was the age of Uber, Airbnb.

People, as consumers, weren't expecting their emails to just go off to the ether. So I know that this part is super basic. It's the tools that we use now as patterns every day. It's very recognized for us. But we had to draw hybrid inspiration from this. We couldn't design, from a resources perspective, the perfect end to end solution, because we also still needed to consider on the other side, the rescue community, majority and still many are, are in paper based forms. So we had to really take these parts into account and not just go, here's the perfect solution.

Now use it. All right. We encountered I'll quickly skip through this. But we encountered hairball number two, which was the non eventful year. That was 2020, if folks remember. The average number of pets the average number of inquiries per pet massively spiked, as they did for pets across Australia.

Rescue pets also felt this, and you can see that how the pinch would have really affected the rescue community. There was a 5.5 times leap in the amount of pets with more than 50 inquiries during this time. And get this, one pet received thirteen sixty six inquiries.

This pet literally took the website down for about five minutes. That alert was very stressful. And we've got better controls in place with that. Anyway, as you can imagine, if we didn't have the bulk messaging response here, thank goodness for that, that would have been quite a stress off for everyone involved, and we could have lost a series of inquiries in that.

So in response to that, and then also the idea of future proofing what this could look like for us, We looked at developing this well, we implemented an inquiry wall where someone would need to have an account to be able to make an inquiry with the idea that we want to raise the amount of raise the quality and intention filtering of the inbound requests in favor of quantity, obviously.

So they could also create an adopter profile, which then links to their account. The rescue organisations gets more context about their household, rather than the back and forth of finding that information in a conversational sense. And so they're just essentially equipped with more information to be able to go through their journey. And that was an introduced friction moment.

We added layers. But for that, it was all about increasing the quality of the whole experience. Okay. So I talked to you about the three main goals that we had. The results did speak for themselves, but I will caveat this with metrics that matter is something that we also examined as part of this and didn't want to get fixated on just the metrics alone. The first goal, we wanted to manage expectations for potential adopters. Expectations is just simply communication control.

So we did see a reduction in complaints from fifty percent from 2018, down to thirty seven percent in 2020. And as of last year, zero point zero zero seven percent of complaints for that reason. Awesome. Okay. Sorry. The transparency also increased, and we were able to align that experience a little better with modern expectations in the in the tooling that was used.

Again, not a complete end to end journey, but it got us closer. So that was something that we did track, and that's not the only, not the only, I suppose, thing that we would see as a signal for success. Our second goal was to create a safe and positive space for all. And through developing that conversations functionality, that, yeah, that two way messaging, we were able to we were able to have some safeguards around how do we have those how do we have those mechanisms in place to be able to handle abuse that might happen in a conversation sense that would otherwise happen offline.

And, also, what emerged out of us putting that in place, I don't have a stat to support it. But what we do have that is now going to outlast and persist the adoption journey for us is that rescue organisations remember how I talked about the adoption policies? They were able to self identify and self go through what those adoption application steps that would be involved would be, and whether they were a flexible, which is conversational based, moderate, or a really strict group that requires folks to have to go through multiple processes.

Again, there's no good or bad here. It was just about communication and setting expectations for potential adopters, and then holding the folks through that process so that they can opt in with that information. So if someone didn't want to go through a strict screening type of process, then they didn't have to proceed with that.

So there was more choice in agency as part of this as a potential adopter. Our last goal that we really wanted to achieve for this project was reducing the workload for overstretched rescues. Sorry. We wanted to create time saving for life saving type of features or automations as part of this. And as mentioned, we wanted to improve the quality of the inquiries and reduce the volume coming through.

So we saw that little blip in that spike year with 2020, where the average amount of inquiries per pet was 9.25. So we reduced that down to last year, 4.3. And the amount of pets between 2020 to last year was 10.7 times less inquiries per pet.

Sorry. Let me rephrase that, because stats are fun. Okay. There were 10.7 times less pets with more than 50 inquiries. Got that right. And overall, from a sentiment, we didn't run a huge like for like research project. But the sentiment from feedback that we received from rescue groups was that through the Adopter Profile feature, the quality of inquiries coming through was better. The quality of information coming through equipped them more with the ability to be able to matchmake and connect.

So that is definitely, some of the positives that came through. There's one more. And everyone a proper researcher, just hold your horses for just a moment. When we napkin math calculated this out, remembering that these were features or automations that were put into place and introduced for activities that didn't exist previously. So we don't actually have a like for like necessarily comparison. But the total potential time saved in emails and communication was I'm going to read it out, because I really like this number. Six million nine hundred and one thousand five hundred and ninety minutes saved, which is the equivalent to thirteen years, one month and seventeen days. Imagine what we can do with that time.

Imagine what the rescue community can do with that time. And then also, in that experience, the important thing was holding people through the whole of the journey. And this is potential adopters, the rescue community, and successful and unsuccessful folks as well. All right. Time for a wrap up. So the thoughts here, where to from here?

I really hope that, even though this was a very pet and sector centric presentation, that you were able to take away some of those thoughts into the industries and line of work that you're in. And I want to acknowledge that this obviously was a case study of functionality that we put into place in the year 2018 to 2020 over time. I know that these solutions aren't groundbreaking.

They're not innovative. We're not going to be winning any technological advancement awards anytime soon. But it was a big deal for a small charity organization with a teeny tiny in house team. And I'm the designer. Considering these contexts and the thing that we're actually equipped with and the thing that I'm hoping that you're all challenging in your respective fields is the idea that if we just focused on what metric we had at that moment, which was pet adoptions and getting all of these inquiries and increasing demand for rescue pets, but didn't actually look at the whole complete picture, we would have missed this completely.

And if we hadn't changed anything, we not have reached that 1,000,000 pets adopted milestone for one. And we might have some really disheartened folks and created a whole word of hurt there. But you know? And I suppose my I suppose my thought there is we questioned why. And we kept questioning why. Why was this happening?

You know? What does this mean? And what happens next? And it's it wasn't until, though, that event that was the catalyst for change for us. So I hope that you all get a chance for that catalyst of change. But ahead of us, we've got a whole new set of challenges. We want to make sure what we're measuring matters.

What gets measured for us gets done. So we're challenging that. We have to shift what that looks like within this new technological construct and context that we're in, and the tensions are completely different now to what they were a decade ago. And The final thought that I'll leave you with is where we're shifting to is rather than these big, I suppose, grand and quite, to be honest, these sexy metrics and sexy changes of big, big numbers, we're going to be looking at the individual.

And for us, that means that it's the pets that didn't receive the 50 to 150 applications during those bite times. We're going to be looking at the ones that only receive one, if they're lucky. And so for us, it's about focusing in on how do we equalize this playing field for the pets that aren't as popular as the others and create a more equitable space for them to be seen, get a chance at love, and be adopted.

And that's not going to show up in the big stats and numbers. So the takeaway is go for less sexy, folks. That's the evolution. Please connect. Stay in touch. Thank you so much for listening.