Wheeki
A website that educates people on the proper care of pet guinea pigs.
Work Type: Senior Capstone Summer 2022–Spring 2023 | UI/UX
Applications: Adobe After Effects, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Figma
Intro
Problem
Guinea Pig is Largely Misunderstood
Kids, parents, and families with pet guinea pigs don’t give their guinea pigs proper care because of the lack of education surrounding guinea pig care. The misconceptions perpetuated in media, such as buying small cages or getting only one guinea pig, often lead to misinformation. As a result, owners become overwhelmed by the amount of care required and end up neglecting their guinea pigs, leading to a subpar quality of life.
Solution
Create an Educational Guinea Pig Care Website
This project will be a website concept, educating people of all ages looking to get guinea pigs as well as be a source of information for current guinea pig owners. It will communicate important information, such as diet, living space, social behavior, and preventive care. This website will help people decide if having guinea pigs is right for them.
Personal Connection to Me
As a parent to five guinea pigs, I think it’s very important to properly care for our furry friends. It's tiring and disappointing to see society treat rodents with such indifference, thinking "Oh, it's just a rodent, whatever." I want to help educate society on what caring for guinea pigs is actually like; they are living creatures that deserve a proper life, just like a dog or a cat. Guinea pigs can be a lot of fun when owners know how to properly care for them, and I want pet owners to experience that joy too without being overwhelmed and unprepared by their care needs.
Design Research
Secondary Research
When people get overwhelmed of guinea pigs and the amount of commitment needed, the neglected guinea pigs become surrendered to overflowing shelters or are abandoned, which greatly reduces their chances of survival. Back in the COVID-19 pandemic, guinea pigs were largely impulsive purchases, and ill-prepared owners were unaware that their lack of proper care also greatly increased the chances of illness in their guinea pigs.
Benchmarking and Moodboard
Existing solutions do cover important guinea pig care, but many website care guides cover superficial information or are just walls of text with barely any supplemental images or icons. There aren’t many options to save resources or to highlight important text either.
Survey and Interview Insights
The purpose of the survey/interview was to gauge the general public’s understanding of guinea pigs, as well as pain points with caring for guinea pigs. Many guinea pig owners wish they knew the high cost involved with their needs, especially guinea pig vet bills, and the amount of care needed to clean cages. People didn’t realize that guinea pigs can poop 100 times a day! I wanted to highlight these in the learning lessons so that people can be aware of the tasks and effort needed to care for guinea pigs.
Ideation
Personas
Wheeki’s main audience is anyone who is interested in caring for guinea pigs. I’ve made subgroups: rodent lovers, parents and children, and young adults.
Information Architecture
The guinea pig education content for Wheeki are sourced from guinea pig sites such as Guinea Lynx and Scotty's Animals. The main feature of Wheeki is the learning modules, which has baseline, important information for guinea pig care. A "Resources" page is for more in-depth information for existing owners to refer back to. A "Community" page is to connect guinea pig owners with each other where they can make posts and ask questions and make a user profile.
Sketches and User Testing
I put together and user tested a Figma prototype of the initial wireframes, showcasing the learning screens of guinea pig care. I kept lessons to be bite-sized and simple. The draft illustrations set the vibe of friendly and approachable, especially for younger audiences too. From a few users, I had lots of feedback on word choice changes, breaking off paragraphs to be sentences, having bigger text in areas of emphasis, and going for a more vectorized art style.
End Concepts
Refined Wireframes/Website
Being inspired by the Beanstalker typeface, I wanted to stray away from a generic, everyday typeface you’d see everywhere. I added jagged edges to buttons, cards, etc to convey a more hand-drawn feeling, as well. I really wanted Wheeki to have a playful and approachable personality but still get the job done of educating those looking to get pet guinea pigs. I also made sure to have simple, broken-apart paragraphs, ample spacing between elements separated with a grey line, and to have enough but not too much content on a single page.
Design Style Guide
Swag
Takeaways
As my senior capstone wrapped up, I’m super proud of single-handedly creating all the animated visuals, wireframes, and prototyping for Wheeki. It was a labor of love!
I thought it was brave of me to experiment with the design language. Normally, I’d stick to modern conventional user interface design, but I felt that having animated, drawn CTA buttons, visuals, and other elements sticks better to the theme of a whimsical, family-friendly website.
I enjoyed getting to continue to hone my UI/UX skills and work more with web design for a topic I love. I got to teach a lot of my classmates on the proper care of guinea pigs and correct misconceptions a lot of them had.