Tinder for Cats

Finding the purrfect match

About the Project

As part of a weekend hackathon focused on helping charities amplify their impact, our team partnered with Toronto Cat Rescue.
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The outcome of this weekend was a tool branded as “Tinder for Cats” which helps the intake coordinator more efficiently match cats in need with foster homes.

My Role

Interaction, Visual Design, Prototyping

Date

November 15-17, 2019

Understanding the Problem

With the limited time we had, we started by trying to understand the problem Toronto Cat Rescue needed solved.

Their mission is to help cats that shelters can’t or won’t take. They often work with cats that have special medical or environmental needs that make shelter life difficult or impossible for them.

The charity is regularly contacted by shelters to help find cats a temporary foster home until they are adopted. They were looking for a solution to pair cats with the most suitable foster homes that would be able to care for their special needs.

Gathering Insights

We spoke with the Executive Director and Lead Volunteer of Toronto Cat Rescue (TCR) to understand the problems they were facing.

Insights

We discovered the process to match a cat with a foster home was time consuming and tedious. Out of a team of six volunteers, only the lead volunteer (Intake Coordinator) was able to do this task.
Each cat has needs that require special attention (e.g. needs to be bottle fed).
Each foster home has a different set of capabilities  (e.g. can bottle feed cat).
The process required the Intake Coordinator to manually compare spreadsheets of data. If a foster home expressed interest in a particular cat, the Intake Coordinator would need to compare the data for the cat against the data for the foster home and determine if it was a good match.

If the foster home was not a good match for the cat, the Intake Coordinator would manually search the cat spreadsheet and see if there was another cat the foster home was better suited to look after.
Existing Process To Match Cats With Foster Homes

Solution

We initially thought of making an automated system which would take the existing list of cats and cross reference them with the existing foster homes to find the best matches. While speaking with the Executive Director and Lead Volunteer, we quickly learned that this would not be the best approach as it would be eliminating the human factor.

Our solution was to determine a compatibility score, which the coordinator was then able to review.  If the score showed that it was not a good match, the coordinator could quickly search the best options for the cat and the foster home. This saved time from manually comparing spreadsheets, and kept the human factor which was critical to the organization.
Dashboard
1. Ability to check for compatibility of a cat and a foster home.

2. Ability to search by cat or foster home only and see their profile and best matches.

3. List of all cats sorted by degree of urgency.

4. Ability to view cat details page.
Matching Page
1. Compatibility score based on algorithm.

2. Ability to go to Cat or Foster Home page to see best matches for each.

3. Detailed breakdown of cat needs and foster compatibility.

Testing and Feedback

Given that we had three days to complete this project, I worked with the developers to do quick usability testing. We worked together to ensure that the designs could be implemented within the timeframe we had.

Results

We were able to deliver a solution that met Toronto Cat Rescue’s needs. The team was very happy with our work, and we were featured in a Betakit article as well.

“You did some amazing work for the cats and kittens of Toronto Cat Rescue. Your software will quite literally enable us to save the lives of cats and kittens who may be euthanized due to lack of adoption interest and overcrowding at shelters.”
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- Todd Burgess (Lead Volunteer, Toronto Cat Rescue)