Smart Dog Collar
At Invoxia, I joined the adventure of building the Smart Dog Collar, a connected device that keeps tabs on your dog's health and location, all from your phone. My role: help turn complex tech into something genuinely useful (and a little bit delightful) for both pets and their humans.
Listening first
We started where every good product does: with users. I led a round of interviews with dog owners to map out their real needs and frustrations. Fifteen conversations later, we had a clear picture of what mattered (and a gentle reminder that location bias is real, and sometimes unavoidable on a tight timeline).
With the insights in hand, we ran a collaborative workshop, PM, CEO, and the whole team, sorting ideas and pain points in FigJam. Not every exercise landed (our ideation session fizzled), but we kept moving, shifting to more traditional discussions to shape our feature list.
Research participant list. Most users recruited directly from active dog owner communities and group on Facebook.
Bird view of all the things we picked up during the interviews
Building fast, together
With CES 2022 as our hard deadline, we worked in five one-week sprints, designing, testing, and handing off at speed. I partnered closely with developers, making sure the design system we put in place kept things consistent and made collaboration smooth.
The app itself is split into five main sections:
- Home: Notifications, articles, and quick questionnaires, for both users and their dogs.
- Location: Real-time tracking on a map, with a timeline of every recorded position, plus features like live tracking, proximity radar, and alert zones.
- Health: Graphs and stats on heart rate, respiratory rate, and more, making sense of biometric data at a glance.
- Activity: Visualizing everything from walks and runs to meals and cuddle time.
- Settings Giving users control to personalize their experience.
SDC UI, health and activity tab. First time manipulating real life data into graph. Special mention to the Poincaré plot that show the pumping sequence of the heart
SDC UI, location and live tracking. Both those UI where leaning heavily in our expertise from GPS tracking. But we where able to add some touch of personality to it
What I learned
Shipping for CES meant balancing speed with detail, and sometimes making tough calls on what to prioritize. But it also meant seeing an idea go from sticky notes to something real, in the hands of real users (and their four-legged friends). And that's the kind of challenge I love, turning complexity into clarity, under pressure, with a team that's all in.