Dog-A-Like

Pet adoption app for Pedigree.

The Project

Designed back in 2010, this was the first app I ever designed. I wireframed, designed the logo, designed every screen, all in Photoshop cos that’s what we did back then. This was an incredibly fun project, and allowed me to dip my feet into the world of Product Design, which unbeknownst to me would become career focus years later.

The Idea

"That dog looks like his owner!" – said everyone all the time.

Based on this insight, and the need to find shelter for so many rescued dogs, the creative team came up with an idea to make an app that would find your perfect match.

You wouldn’t be paired with any dog – you’d be paired with a dog that looked like you. These dog profiles would be sourced from the live Pet Rescue Database of Australia. And so, the idea for the Dog-A-Like app was born.

The Work

We created an app that would prompt a user to take a photo of themselves using the app. The facial recognition engine(which we built in New Zealand, which at the time had never been done before), would extract every facial feature from that photo in 16 dimensions, and would compare it against thousands of dog profiles with pictures that had also gone through the same process.

The user would then be served a dog profile that would look like them, and they could adopt them directly from their phone. for 2011, that was quite something.

My Role

Early days of app builds, I did everything here from sketching wires, mapping our journeys and designing the final app. I also designed the logo, branding and all marketing materials.

UI Design

UX Design

Logo Design

Dogs look like their owners. Or do owners look like their dogs?

Yes and Yes. We custom-built a canine analysis engine for a phone(and even a Facebook app – that’s the thing that really dates this project!). The engine would match your facial features with a dog from the live Pet Rescue database of Australia. The app would not only match the user’s facial features, but it would allow you to adopt them then and there, rescuing the dog from most likely being put down.

Sadly, over 100,000 shelter dogs are euthanised every year in Australia because people think they are damaged and find it difficult visiting shelter homes to adopt.

If we couldn’t bring people to the shelter dogs, we decided to bring the shelter dogs to the people.

Campaign Video

The Awards

To this day, Dog-A-Like has been Mars Pedigree’s most successful dog rehoming campaign, and one of the most awarded campaigns in the brand’s history. The Dog-A-Like app was no. 1 in the Australian app store for two weeks straight, with 5.8 million users on the Facebook app.

2011

Bronze / Social

Gold / Apps