Wag! is the on-demand app that connects dog owners with trusted walkers in minutes. As a founding team member I was the sole designer across product, brand, and marketing for the first few years.
The core challenge was trust. How do you convince someone to let a stranger into their home, hand over their most beloved family member, and feel completely confident the whole time?
How might we design an experience so trustworthy that strangers feel like neighbors?
Understand the trust barrier
Define the moment of handoff
Design for safety & transparency
Build confidence at every touchpoint
Deliver peace of mind
Dogs are metaphors of children. Their owners want whimsy, playfulness and joy. Yet handing your keys to a stranger demands trust.
Finding that tension point between trust and playfulness would be our ongoing challenge at Wag!
We designed trust before we
designed features
Owner, walker and dog. Each experience
designed to enhance the other
Balancing whimsy and trust was the defining creative challenge
The following screens represent the early stage product. A window into the early thinking before the visual design matured.
From a living room startup we scaled to three major cities. Here’s what the work delivered.
Seed funding secured within the first 6 months of launch
Scaled to LA, San Francisco and New York, all within the first year of launch
1 in 6 owners shared report cards to social media. Zero ad spend required
Designing for trust in a marketplace isn’t about adding features. It’s about reducing uncertainty at every step.
We added more services such as sitting, boarding, daycare and grooming.
We also introduced dynamic home screen cards that served the right offer to the right user at the right time.
Report card shares had been starting to fatigue so we introduced a steady stream of fresh artwork filters.We also added filter sharing on the walker side which saw the same 15% share rate.
Five years of helping lay the foundation. Here are some key outcomes.
SoftBank Vision Fund investment in 2018. Wag! had arrived
From five guys working out of a living room to listed on Nasdaq in 2022
Filters had zero fatigue for over 5 yrs. We also added sharing for walker side
