Helping shelters work efficiently, so every dog has a better chance at finding a loving home.
The problem
Most small shelters run on memory, whiteboards, and a website nobody has time to update.
Staff can't recall which dogs have been walked or fed. Volunteers show up eager but blind. Adopters fall for a dog online, drive over, and learn it was adopted last week. The work is loving — the tooling isn't. I set out to design a single product that fits the real rhythm of a shelter instead of adding admin on top of it.
Before a single screen, I mapped the three groups a shelter product has to serve at once — each with different tech comfort, time, and goals. Their tension is the whole design problem.
What the research surfaced
Every wish traces back to minutes saved. The product has to remove admin, not add it — updates must be a by-product of doing the work.
Feeding, walks, and availability change hourly. If the record isn't effortless to update in the moment, it's wrong by afternoon.
With no fixed hours or expertise, they need the app to tell them who to walk next and make logging a single tap.
An accurate, always-current dog list — plus compatibility and scheduling — turns wasted trips into confident visits.
User Flow
The homepage forks on a single question — are you here to adopt, or do you work here? From there each role gets only what it needs, with an AI-assisted roadmap layered on top of a shippable core.
The solution
A public, always-current list of who's actually available.
Tells volunteers who to walk next, logs it in a tap.
Staff register, feed, schedule, and update dogs from one place.
Branding & Design
Only once the product was clear did I dress it. Shelters are emotional, high-trust places — the identity had to read as caring but organized. The name Shelt.r shortens “shelter” into something app-like; the mark tucks a paw inside a home.
