Austin Animal Center - Web App

Inspiration

We are passionate volunteers at the largest no-kill municipal animal shelter in the country - with 18,000 animals coming through the doors each year. To keep the no-kill mission, AAC is constantly at capacity and animals stay at the shelter longer than ideal. With hundreds of animals to see at the shelter, finding information on each can become overwhelming for visitors who need to find a staff member with desktop access to learn more about each. Providing easier access to the positive characteristics of each dog/cat would get more animals into their forever homes, faster. We created a web-app that allows the public to quickly see information about the animal they’re interested from their mobile device, versus waiting for a volunteer or staff member for assistance.

What it does

Our web app displays a mobile optimized profile for each shelter animal including photos, a description of the animal, and additional characteristics not found on the existing kennel card. Using a QR code that we add to the kennel card, people can instantly pull up the profile by opening their iOS camera or android QR reader. It pulls data from the animal center internal database and allows volunteers and staff to instantly add and edit information and photos for the animal profile. The ability for the public to access a profile of the animals instantly will save substantial staff and volunteer time spent answering basic questions as well as empowering them to instantly edit and add information to the profiles.

How we built it

We used Google Firebase to host the database and populated it with information from the internal Austin Animal Center database as well as photo and text input from users. We created the animal profile pages as well as the browse page using Angular. We also created a page for volunteers and staff to edit and add information to the database from each animals profile.

Challenges we ran into

Data accessibility from an antiquated database system, parsing and implementing the data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We identified a very practical and substantial problem and created an equally practical and efficient solution in our web app. We were able to source the important information and display it in a simple and elegant web app.