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
Problem Statement
Guinea Pig Care 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, including diet, living environment, social interaction, and preventive 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 and early death in the pet.
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.
Solution
Create a Family-Friendly Guinea Pig Website
Needs to accomplish: successfully educating people looking to get guinea pigs as well as be a source of information for current guinea pig owners. This will help people decide if having guinea pigs is right for them.
Needs to communicate: important guinea pig care information, such as diet, living space, social behavior, and preventive care, in chunks with visuals and simple animations
How it performs: website prototype, but as a concept this project can function on any device such as mobile phones, tablet, and desktop
Audience: prospective guinea pig owners of all ages and current guinea pig owners
Process
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.
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.
Onboarding
First-time users can select whether they’re a kid or an adult to have specific content catered to them and their guinea pig care experience level. Then they can create a user profile to help keep track of any saved resources, engage with a guinea pig community, and log in any owned guinea pigs.
Home
A large banner is meant to be eye-catching, with the call-to-action button to help users navigate to the guinea pig learning modules. A “fun fact of the day” secondary banner helps provide random but interesting facts about guinea pigs. And below are standard goal statements and focus areas, including education, community, and user profile, all of which have a button leading to their respective page.
Learn
There are 5 total learning modules on important guinea pig care: a brief intro to guinea pigs, a balanced diet, a comfy living space, social interaction, and preventive care. Each module has three sub-lessons and a quiz at the end, and it takes about 8–10 minutes to complete. The modules are meant to be short and not overwhelming, but still have all the important guinea pig information. At the end of all the learning modules, a final quiz will be available, with a certificate of completion when finished! It would help for when kids want to show their parents that they’ve completed their guinea pig learning!
Learning Module Screens
The learning module screens each have their own sections divided by a grey line for ample spacing. The sections have animated visuals to supplement the text and are meant to be short and easy to digest. Users can bookmark pages, write personal notes, and/or highlight text, which show in the Learn page. At the end of each module, there will be a short quiz that to help users stay further engaged.
Additional Resources
After finishing the final quiz, users have access to additional resources that are more in-depth. They’re more niche topics and not necessarily required for the learning modules (because they’re meant to be short), but for those looking for more information. The resources tab is locked initially as to not overwhelm first-time users with too much information.
Guinea Pig Checklist
In addition to unlocking additional resources, a personal “guinea pig checklist” is unlocked, with materials needed for guinea pig care before getting the guinea pigs. Users can print this screen, as well as click the checkboxes of items they have.
Guinea Pig Community
The community tab in the navigation bar allows users to engage with the guinea pig community by asking questions related to guinea pig care, commenting on posts, sharing their guinea pigs, bookmarking helpful resources and anecdotes, and making new friends!
User Profile
The user profile, the last item in the navigation bar, displays the user’s name, username, pronouns, and experience level. There are also user posts, their recent activity, and likes that can be toggled (and also be public or private). Users can also log in their guinea pigs under the “My guinea pigs” side tab and record their guinea pig’s name, gender, birthday/adoption dates, neuter/spay status, vet visits and additional notes beneficial for the user to know.
