Barks & Rec

Community Pet Owner App

Barks & Rec is an application created to build community, educate, and encourage outdoor play between pets and pet owners in their local area. Made in collaboration with Grace Miller and Adaire Trachta-Magruder.

Project Prompt and Goals

As a team, we were challenged with creating an application that could serve and apply to these three topics:

Equitability

Pet Owners

Parks and Rec.

Discovery

After analyzing our three prompts to focus us in on what kind of app we would make, we carefully thought of how we could combine parks and recreation and pet owners with equitability. While brainstorming, we decided to focus our survey on types of recreation facilities enjoyed by the public especially those with a pet and also evaluating the average persons knowledge on the topic of service and assistance animals.

Survey and Pain Points

In our survey about service animals, we found that majority of those responding who did not have a service animal did not know the proper way to act around a service animal or what to do if they were to see a handler in an emergency. Pain points from our surveyed pool of people with service animals, mostly seemed to stem from the lack of education on service and assistance animals by the public. Now with this understanding of our service animal handler community, we wanted to make sure education on assistance animals was a feature that our app could provide.

The next big question was…

In order to create interest around an app that has an education section on service animals we decided to look at our survey data. Through our survey, we found that 81.8% and 72.7% of our surveyed group enjoyed doing recreational activities at outdoor parks and hiking trails. With this information, we thought of making an app for pet owners that helps them to build community and get outside, while also having a section of educational resources on assistance animals.

Reviewing Research for a Solution.