In my last week of research I looked into the current problems vets have to deal with and I felt I found a niche to continue my research in.

This week I started to look at veterinary practices as a whole including vet nurses and receptionists. I also started to complete some user research in terms of surveys and interviews with people in the industry.

Firstly, I read this article about vet jobs unfilled . It states that “23% of empty positions in Britain took more than six months to fill.”  This proves that there is clearly something that is making these job roles seem undesirable. Some vets think this could be due to long unsociable hours with low pay. This is something I can’t fix with an app but I think if I could think of a product that would lessen their work hours or make parts of the process more efficient.

I think there is a niche for me to work with in area of vet and animal healthcare. Therefore I decided to look into building and designing for pet health, where I found this article.

After the market research I had done into this field, deciding if a product could be made to help and that there is room in the market for this. I decided that this would be the direction my app would go into.

First I needed to work out exactly what my app would do.  The optimal goal would be for vets in this country to be able to work less hours and find their jobs less stressful. I need to do a survey to send out to some vets that our working in the country currently to really narrow down the focus of the app and the user requirements, but for now I need to decide on some general ideas and features the app would have for the user research to take effect and develop the product.

To help decide the general idea of the app I made this mind map:

After this was completed and I had a better idea of what my app would do I created a survey using GoogleForms.

I planned what my questions should be in my surve. From my mindmap,  I knew what my goals would be for the product and how I would try to reach these goals. Therefore I tried to ask questions about these features I would have and if they would be useful or beneficial for their jobs.

The topics for the questions I landed on were…

• Stress levels in their current job
• Contributions to stress
• common illnesses in pets and if they could be solved virtually
• overweightness in pets
• would tracking symptoms and health be useful
• would communication with vets through product be useful
• any feedback they have for the app and what they would add.

You can view the finished form here.

These are the results from the 19 overall respondents I had for the form.

Feedback:

From the responses it is easy to see that they are under a lot of stress in their profession and in the second question where I asked what contributed to the stress, the most common answers were:

Time spent emailing clients: 42.1%

Time in consults:  26.3%

Client’s high expectations:  15.9%

the last response was really interesting to me as it was not one of the given answers they could choose from but rather what a lot of respondents entered into the ‘other’ option. This means that this is a problem given to me directly from them and is something I will keep in mind during my product development.

Another interesting bit of feedback I gathered from this survey was from the final question about any other features they think would be useful.  They came up with the feature of reminders for the clients for revisits and vaccines and possibly an option to reorder medications and prescriptions without having to go into the practice. Due to the high probability that the pet’s are overweight they think that an option to track feed and calorie input along with exercise could be useful.