BorrowMyDoggy
Solving marketplace imbalance and user frustration in a pet-sitting platform through clearer expectations and improved matching signals.
BorrowMyDoggy is a London-based pet platform that connects dog owners with dog 'borrowers' for walks, sitting and holiday care. Positioned as an affordable, community-spirited alternative to expensive kennels, the platform is similar to a dating site, where owners can create profiles for their pets to match with nearby dog lovers. As an early employee and first design hire, I helped transform an unrefined MVP into a scalable product that balanced the complex dynamics of two-sided marketplaces.
Deliverables: UX & UI Design, User Research, Design System, Product Strategy, Team Leadership
Project Type: Mobile App, Web Platform, B2C, Marketplace
Team: Head of Design (me), Junior Designers, Front-end Developer, Back-end Developer
Business Goal
BorrowMyDoggy had validated their core business model with loyal early adopters but it lacked authority and had limited features that supported longer term sustainable growth. The platform also faced similar challenges to dating sites, with an imbalance of too many borrowers competing for the attention of limited dog owners. The goal was to improve the overall user experience, balance expectations and increase successful matches to limit churn.
User Goal
The quality of borrower profiles was poor and dog owners were facing a constant barrage of impersonal messages and requests, even if they were not actively seeking a borrower. This imbalance was leading to high churn of owners and low satisfaction for all. Borrowers needed clearer expectations and transparency around availability of dogs while owners needed better matching signals and filtering options.
Design Process
Over three years, I created and embedded a culture of lean validation and continuous improvement, established user-centered practices and scaled a design team. Here’s how I tackled some of the key challenges:
01. Customer Insights
Embedded within the customer support team, I answered support tickets, sought direct user feedback and audited complaints to gain valuable insights. It became evident that the marketplace liquidity was causing misaligned expectations and frustration between users. Borrowers complained about not hearing back from owners but put little effort into their profiles. Owners grew frustrated by endless impersonal messages or churned after finding a borrower, often leaving their profiles active despite no longer needing them.
02. Co-Design Workshops
While complaints highlighted issues, I also wanted to understand what worked well. I created the ‘Canine Council,’ a quarterly feedback group of loyal, engaged borrowers and owners. By encouraging the entire BorrowMyDoggy team to help moderate, I was able to gain valuable customer insights while establishing a culture of design thinking that carried throughout the organisation. These sessions included card sorting, brainstorming, usability testing and other design activities that unlocked ideas for new features and improvements.
03. Activity Transparency
I hypothesised that by focusing on message quality and transparency around user availability we could radically improve matching and reduce the frustrations and churn evident in our insights. I designed an ‘Activity Scale’ feature that used data points such as message response rates, login activity and interaction frequency to help users identify members who are likely to respond. The scale shows how active a user is, how engaged they are with other users and removed the need to explicitly display a ‘last online’ time that was seen as invasive.
04. Expectation Management
To improve message quality, I restricted messaging functionality to users with completed profiles and created a ‘Seeking Status’ indicator that gave both borrowers and owners a way to display their current availability. These expectation setting features reduced low-quality introductory messages by 42%, increased meaningful matches by 65% and had the added benefit of improving overall profile completion rates. Both features were tested with the Canine Council process, focusing on language clarity and ease of use.
05. Onboarding Optimisation
Onboarding drop-off was a significant challenge for the platform. I conducted user testing sessions and interviewed over 30 abandoned users to understand their experience. The consensus was that the multi-step, eight page profile creation flow was overwhelming and time-consuming. I redesigned the process to collect only essential information at signup and progressively encouraged profile completion at touchpoints across the platform. This reduced task time from over 12 minutes to 2 minutes and increased profile completion from 28% to over 75%.
06. Platform Redesign
I led a comprehensive redesign of the entire product suite, including the website, iOS and Android apps. Midway through my tenure, I expanded the design team by bringing on two junior designers. Together, we developed an adaptable design system that ensured consistency across platforms and accelerated development efficiency. The new design system incorporated clear visual hierarchy, simplified navigation and interaction patterns that enhanced brand cohesion, usability and accessibility.
BorrowMyDoggy was a rewarding challenge in designing for two uniquely distinct user types. By embedding myself in customer support, establishing co-design processes and validating ideas early, I helped reduce churn, improve message quality and boost meaningful matches between owners and borrowers.
From onboarding optimisation through to platform redesign and team leadership, my work laid the foundation for scalable, product-led growth. Many of the features I introduced continue to underpin the platform’s success today.
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