Dr Pet: booking a vet at 1am, and arriving prepared

Pet emergencies don't keep office hours. A cat stops eating at 11pm, a dog won't stop scratching at 1am, and the owner is left guessing: which clinic is open, which vet treats this species, what it will cost, and whether it can wait until morning.

And when they finally get seen, the consultation starts from nothing. The vet asks what happened, when it started, what the animal ate, how long it's been going on — questions the owner has already answered in their head a dozen times while waiting. Both sides lose time at the worst possible moment.

Research goal: understand the needs and pain points of pet owners when they take their pets to a clinic during late nights.

I ran six user interviews from a guide prepared beforehand. Participants were aged 21 to 38, all pet owners, with professions ranging from HR manager and anchor to product designer and iOS developer.

Everything else in this concept follows from one choice: collect the symptoms while the owner is booking, not when the consultation starts.

After picking a service, the owner answers a short structured set — hair loss (whole body, particular area, none), itching (long period, localised, none), rashes, dandruff, time since the last occurrence, what the pet has eaten, and a photo of the affected area. It takes a handful of taps.

The vet then opens that appointment and sees all of it, alongside medical history, before pressing Start.

Why structured, not a free-text box. At 1am a worried owner types "he's scratching a lot", which tells a clinician almost nothing. Constrained options produce something a vet can actually triage on — and tapping four chips is faster than typing a paragraph one-handed while holding an anxious animal.