Tiny Tails
A connected pet-parent experience for care, connection, and progress
Tiny Tails brings community, walk tracking, weight goals, and gamification into one pet care experience, Tiny Tails brings community, walk tracking, weight goals, and gamification into one pet-care experience helping pet parents stay active with their pets while giving them a social reason to keep coming back. pet parents stay active with their pets while giving them a social reason to keep coming back
Industry
:
Pet Care Community Platform
Timeline
:
6 Months
Role
:
Product Designer(Worked under the supervision of WTF! Founders.)
Problem
Pet parents know their pets need activity. Staying consistent is the hard part.
Walking a dog is already part of everyday life, but the behaviour is rarely tracked. Weight goals can be difficult to maintain, progress is easy to forget, and there is little feedback that makes a routine feel rewarding.
I already walk my dog. I don't need another app telling me to walk — I need something that makes me want to keep the routine going.
At the same time, pet parents naturally share photos, stories, and milestones with other people. That existing social behaviour became an opportunity: instead of treating activity tracking as a utility that users have to remember, Tiny Tails could connect it to community, progress, and recognition.
How might we make healthy pet-care routines easier to track, more visible over time, and motivating enough to become a habit?
Understanding the behaviour
I approached the product from the perspective of a pet parent. Understand the everyday routine first, then design the product around the moments where motivation drops.
Competitive perspective, Existing pet products tend to focus on one job: activity tracking, pet information, or social sharing. Social platforms are good at engagement but are not designed around pet-care routines. Activity trackers provide data but can feel transactional. Tiny Tails explored the space between the two, a product where tracking creates useful progress, while community and rewards create motivation.
What mattered from the pet-parent perspective
If I can see that we're improving, I'm more likely to keep doing it.
Sharing what my dog is doing is already something I enjoy. Having that connected to walks would make the app more interesting.
A badge or streak is small, but it gives me a reason to not break the routine.
Synthesis
From a tracking problem to a motivation loop
The product opportunity became clearer when the problem was looked at as a loop rather than a collection of features.
Track
Make walks easy to start, monitor, and complete without adding friction to an existing routine.
Set goals
Turn activity and weight into visible targets so pet parents know what progress looks like.
Stay motivated
Use streaks, badges, and leaderboard progress to make consistency feel rewarding.
Share & discover
Use a community feed to give pet parents a reason to return beyond the moment they start a walk.
The core opportunity
Make walk tracking simple enough to become part of an existing routine.
Make weight and walk goals visible so progress feels tangible.
Turn consistency into a positive feedback loop through badges and leaderboard recognition.
Connect the utility layer with a community feed that creates daily engagement.
Product hypothesis, If Tiny Tails connects activity → progress → recognition → community, pet parents will have more reasons to maintain healthy routines instead of treating tracking as another chore.
Ideation
Choosing a product loop, not just a feature list
I explored different ways the product could create value before converging on the connected experience.
Activity tracker first
Idea
Focus almost entirely on walking, distance, duration, and progress.
Why it was attractive
Clear value proposition and a relatively focused MVP.
Why I moved away
Tracking alone does not provide enough emotional or social motivation to keep users engaged between walks.
Community first
Idea
Build a pet-focused social feed around photos, stories, and discovery.
Why it was attractive
Strong potential for habitual browsing and social engagement.
Why I moved away
A social feed by itself does not solve the behavioural problem around activity and healthy routines.
Connected pet-care loop
Idea
Combine community, walk tracking, weight and walk goals, and gamification.
Why I chose it
It connects the functional reason to use the product with an emotional reason to return progress and recognition.
Structure
User flow built around the core loop
I structured the experience so the five core behaviours remain easy to access without making the product feel like a dashboard full of tools.
The key structural decision was making Community the home experience while keeping Walk immediately accessible. This balances the product's daily engagement layer with its core behavioural utility.
Key design decisions
Designing the motivation loop
Community Feed as the front door
Problem
A utility only tracker gives users little reason to open the product when they are not actively walking.
Decision
Make the Community Feed the Home experience, combining pet moments, discoveries, and activity related content.
Why
Community creates a lightweight daily-open behaviour, while the rest of the product supports the deeper care routine.
Walk Tracker as the behavioural core
Problem
Pet parents may already walk regularly, but the activity is easy to forget and difficult to evaluate over time.
Decision
Create a simple walk flow that captures activity and feeds progress into goals and rewards.
Why
The tracker is not valuable only because it records a walk. Its value increases when that data contributes to a visible sense of progress.
Weight & Walk Goals make progress visible
Problem
Healthy routines are difficult to maintain when progress is abstract or invisible.
Decision
Translate activity and weight into clear goals that users can monitor over time.
Why
A goal gives the tracking data a purpose. Instead of simply seeing that a walk happened, users can understand how the behaviour contributes to a larger outcome.
Badges & Leaderboard turn consistency into recognition
Problem
Progress can feel repetitive when the only reward is a number on a screen.
Decision
Use badges for personal milestones and a leaderboard for optional social competition.
Why
Badges reinforce personal progress, while the leaderboard adds a social layer for users who enjoy comparison and friendly competition.
Visual design
Playful enough to motivate, clear enough to use every day
The visual system was designed around the emotional side of pet parenting warm, friendly, social, and celebratory. At the same time, tracking and goal information needs to remain highly scannable because users interact with it during everyday activities.
Parkinsans & Poppins
I chose Parkinsans for headings to create a bold, friendly, and distinctive personality, while Poppins supports the interface with a clean, modern, and highly readable style, creating a balanced visual language that feels both playful and approachable for pet parents.
Drag to View
Rounded containers, expressive typography, bright accent colours, and playful reward moments create personality. Progress indicators, goal values, and tracker states use stronger hierarchy so the interface does not sacrifice clarity for personality.
The screens
Four moments that define the experience
Community Feed
The daily-open layer: discover pets, share moments, and stay connected with the community.
Pet Profile
A dedicated space for each pet, bringing their profile, activity, weight, and goals together in one place.
Walk Tracker
Start and track a walk with a focused experience that turns activity into measurable progress.
Badges & Leaderboard
Celebrate milestones and optionally compare progress with the wider community.
Outcomes
A complete pet-parent ecosystem, not a collection of isolated features
Community Feed
Creates a dedicated social destination for pet moments, discovery, and everyday engagement.
Connections
Gives pet parents a way to discover and connect with other people and pets through a shared pet-first context.
Walk Tracker
Turns a recurring real-world activity into measurable product behaviour.
Weight & Walk Goals
Gives activity a longer-term purpose by making personal progress visible.
Badges & Leaderboard
Adds recognition and optional social competition without making gamification the entire product.
Connected ecosystem
Each feature adds value to another community creates discovery, activity creates progress, progress creates recognition, and recognition gives users more to share and return to.
Metrics for the next phase
Community Feed return rate, connection actions, walk-tracking activation and completion, goal creation and completion, badge engagement, leaderboard participation, and retention across users who engage with multiple feature areas.
Outcomes
Designing the system was more important than designing any single feature
What I'd explore next
I would next validate which feature combinations create the strongest repeat behaviour, how users perceive the relationship between social connection and activity, and whether personal achievement or community competition is the stronger motivator for different types of pet parents.
As the solo Product Designer, I focused on turning a broad feature set into one coherent product experience, while working under the supervision and critique of the WTF! founders and Design Director. The biggest design challenge was balance. Community needed to feel alive, activity needed to feel useful, goals needed to feel meaningful, and gamification needed to feel rewarding without overwhelming the product.