Vaccination cards live in a drawer, prescriptions in a camera roll, and the vet's history behind a portal login. When a kennel, a sitter or a locum vet needs one specific fact, the owner becomes the search engine. DogFile keeps one structured record and makes handing over the right slice of it a five-second job.
How to read this: research, IA, UI, the token system and the prototype were all mine, with no collaborators. Nothing below is dressed up as a finding — anything untested is labelled as an assumption, and every empty figure is a slot waiting for real participant data rather than an invented number.
The paperwork outlives the appointment.
A dog's health history lives in a folder, three apps and the back of someone's memory. The moment it's actually needed — a sitter, a locum vet, an emergency — nobody can produce it.
Paper, portals and photos, each holding a different part of the truth and none of them holding all of it.
The owner is the interface. They answer the same questions at every drop-off, then over-share because a photo of the whole card is the only unit they have.
Clinic apps are built around the practice's workflow, one login each, and empty the moment you change vet. The camera roll is fast to capture and impossible to query.
Name the assumption, then design against it.
Four weeks, self-initiated, no client to interview. So I audited the existing apps, wrote the research plan I would run with a real budget, and put the load-bearing assumption in writing rather than dressing it up as a finding.
Authoritative and stamped by the vet, and only useful if you happen to be standing next to it. Fails on reach, sharing, loss.
Built around the practice, not the owner. Fails on portability and ownership.
Nothing tells you which photo is the current one. Fails on structure, trust and recency.
Calm surfaces, one accent, status you can read without reading.
Calm surfaces, one accent, and status you can read at a glance without reading a word.
Home opens on the one thing that needs doing, with the action attached to it. Everything else on the screen is status, not a task.
Which clinic, which batch, which certificate, scanned when. Without it a vaccination entry is a claim rather than proof — and a kennel is being asked to trust a typed date.
Toggles pick the scope, and a plain sentence — “Bramble's vaccinations and certificates. Nothing else. Access ends in 14 days.” — sits directly above the button that sends it.
The emergency profile is dark, read-only and offline: critical warning first, current medication, vaccinations, registered vet, and the calls last. No login, because the person holding the phone may not have one.
A testing plan, and what the concept taught me.
It's a concept, so the honest outcome is a sharper problem, a testable prototype, and a plan for proving it.
Metric: time to first successful log, and whether undo is discovered without prompting.
Metric: does the participant read the scope summary before creating the link?
Metric: time to the critical warning, starting from a locked phone.
Numbers stay empty until the sessions are run. Five participants per round is the target — enough to surface the blocking issues, not enough to claim significance.
I started out designing a tracker and kept finding the interesting problem was the handover. Cutting booking and reminders to make room for scoped sharing was the decision that made the concept coherent.
A missing vaccination record is more dangerous than a stale one, because it looks the same. Giving “No record” its own treatment — a hollow ring, never a colour that reads as fine — was a small change with a large safety effect.
With no researcher to hand off to, the honest move was to label what I hadn't run rather than quietly imply it. That constraint made the concept easier to critique, which is the point of a concept.
Run the six interviews for real and rewrite the two modes of use against coded themes. Then test the emergency screen with people who have never seen the app, because that is the only screen designed for a stranger.
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na Gj.Senior UX and product designer. I make complicated things feel simple.