This term went by so fast. I can’t believe this is the last blog post I’m writing! Looking back when I first started, I was a little nervous because of the new tech stack we decided to use yet I was so excited to see what I could learn along the way. I think I’ve come a long way and I’m happy with the outcome I’ve achieved so far which are the sign-up landing page, user signup page, shelter signup page, user profile page, shelter profile page, and shelter management page.

Although all of the essential functionalities have been implemented for these pages, I would not call them complete yet as UX is also an important factor to a successful product. For example, user password fields are not required when updating account unless a user is trying to update password but they’re still displayed on user profile page as shown in the screenshot below. How would users know they don’t need to fill out these fields? They probably don’t. What’s most likely to happen is that users will end up filling out the whole form to update even just their first name.

I would call this a flaw in design and need to be fixed to improve user experience. A simple fix would be adding an update password button to display password fields only when clicked. This will prevent users from wasting time and filling out unnecessary information when it’s not needed. This is just a minor change but it already makes the experience much more natural and intuitive.

And then on the shelter management page, pets associated to the signed-in shelter are all listed out in blocks on a single page. It works fine for testing a few pets but imagine if the shelter has 50, 100, or 500 pets. The page will become an infinite scroll and will be very difficult for users to navigate. What if the user is looking for a pet with a specific name or looking for a specific type of pets? He’ll have to scroll through the 500 pets to locate the one he’s looking for. The user would be lucky to find the pet before his eyes give up. To improve the situation, adding a search box, a filter, and pagination would be sensible.

Now that we’ve seen some glimpse of how much of a difference UX can make, I think it would be best to add those finishing touches to improve the overall quality and UX for our own project.