ZooSync
An app for zookeepers.
Zookeepers. Who are they?
Overview
I know what you're thinking: Why zookeepers?
Well, when my team was tasked with designing or redesigning an app in just five weeks, it definitely didn’t seem obvious to choose zookeepers as our audience… I actually pitched the idea half-jokingly, expecting it to be tossed out, or at best spark a better (read: less weird?) one.
To my surprise, the team loved it. And just like that, our app for zookeepers was born.
Our Process
The Team: Dasha Orlov, Tam Tran, Farrel Sudrajat, Joy Yao, and me (Jana)!
Approach
What made this project so exciting was that we started with zero knowledge about zookeeping. That meant our process was rooted in curiosity and research — learning about zookeepers’ daily routines, their challenges, what they care about, and everything in between.
Research
Dasha and Tam kicked things off by digging into online resources about zookeeping, while Farrel and Joy conducted a competitive audit of existing tools. With help from my teammates, I led the user surveys. I designed a 20+ question Google Form and sent it out to Reddit — a long shot, but it paid off! We heard back from 7 real zookeepers who shared incredibly thoughtful responses.
(If you're more curious about what we learned, I'd love to talk about it!)
Insights + Goals
We gathered our findings, mapped key insights, and highlighted standout responses from the survey. From there, we established the core goals our app needed to meet — leading us to define our UX strategy pyramid and move into ideation.
Finalizing Our Concept & Iterating
Finalizing the Concept
With a few more collaborative activities (hence the colorful circles!) and valuable feedback from our instructor, we refined our golden flow and identified the signature experiences and key features we wanted to highlight in our app’s narrative.
That’s when Dasha mapped out our information architecture, and I began translating it into lo-fi wireframes. From there, Joy and Farrel enhanced the wireframes using the visual style tile that Tam had created.
Iterating
At this stage, it was all about iteration, making thoughtful changes, testing them out, and refining the experience. But we weren’t just designing blindly. We continually referred back to our user survey responses and the insights we had mapped early on to keep our decisions grounded in real zookeeper needs.
Our UX strategy pyramid also served as a constant checkpoint , helping us evaluate whether new ideas or tweaks aligned with our overarching goals. This back-and-forth between design and validation helped ensure that every feature we added had a purpose, and that our app stayed focused, relevant, and user-centered.
Refining the Design
Once we finalized the visual design elements, flow, and screens, Farrel created all the Figma components to ensure consistency across the app. I then used those components to build out our final, refined screens. From there, Dasha and Farrel prototyped the user flow, while Joy focused on adding motion for the audio snippet and the presentation along with Tam.
Next Steps
We will be reaching out to the zookeepers we interviewed who expressed interest in seeing our final product to get their feedback!